


Dance of the Seasons

by whatdoyoumeanitsnotawesome



Series: Do What You Love And You'll Never Work A Day In Your Life [5]
Category: Letterkenny (TV)
Genre: Anger, Angst, Autistic Wayne, Backstory, Break Up, Canon Relationships, Cheating, Dead Parents, Dissociation, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/M, Family, Grief/Mourning, Minor Character Death, No Dialogue, Original Character Death(s), Relationship Problems, Wayne's Brain Gymnastics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-19
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-07-14 12:52:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 36,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16040858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whatdoyoumeanitsnotawesome/pseuds/whatdoyoumeanitsnotawesome
Summary: Wayne is a farmer. Growing things is what he knows. You prepare the soil, you plant the seeds, you water and shelter and protect your crops, and then you reap them. The wheel of the year keeps turning and the next season brings the next steps in the old dance of sow and harvest.





	1. I. SPRING.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't usually post WIPs, but here's hoping I can light a fire under my own arse.

When Wayne first started seeing Angie it was exciting and new, as it always is. Spring is when things bloom, and flowers set to fruit. They went on dates, they went on other dates, they talked all the time, or at least as much as Wayne ever did. They learned new things together, and some old things too.

Making time with Angie was nothing like anyone he'd ever kissed before. There had been encounters, sure, at parties and dances and the like. But Wayne could count on Frankie Four-Fingers' hands[*] the number of people he was actually comfortable with touching him, so those almost never came to anything romance-wise; and if they did it was over after a couple of months, if not weeks. But with Angie his blood boiled hot and rushed around, makin' him restless and almost giddy.

That didn't mean he lost his head, though. Wayne was still and only ever himself, and he couldn't help how he was made any more than a clay jar could tell the potter his own business. He didn't mind getting Angie off, heck he gets off on it, but he knew he wasn't ready to literally or figuratively bare all of himself to her. So he used his hands and his mouth to make her happy and tended to himself after when he was alone.

His reticence was the cause of their first true fight. They'd been together for almost a year (far, far longer than he'd ever been with anyone else,) but still hadn't consummated the union.

Angie thought he didn't really want her, and Wayne couldn't articulate the reason he was holding back from her well enough to make her feel better. The argument stretched out for pert near a week before they were both so frustrated they ended up dry-riding each other in the bed of Wayne's truck until they both made a mess in their jeans. Cuddled up and panting in the aftermath, Wayne finally admitted that he found the whole business overwhelming and the very idea of giving so much of himself to someone else was kind of scary. He liked what they did together, found it very fulfilling, and he wasn't willing to rush into anything more. Angie promised to try to do better respecting his boundaries and to wait until he was ready. Wayne considered this to be a very adult and mature attitude and a good compromise on both their parts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *So-called because he'd lost all but one thumb and the stump of the pinky finger on one hand, and the ring and pinky fingers on his other hand, in not one, nor two, but _three separate_ fireworks incidents.  [return to text]


	2. II. SUMMER

Another Spring comes and goes and Wayne and Angie settle into the long, slow Summer of their relationship, into knowing and being known, growing as close and familiar as each other's right hand. Angie spends the night sometimes, and they sleep curled 'round each other like petals waiting to open and blossom. Wayne loves sleeping with her, loves waking up each morning to see the light stretching across the room and bouncing off the sheets, making their skin glow faintly. It's summer when his bones tell him the time is right. He wakes her up with kisses and caresses, and they make love in the middle of the night with the windows open to the sound of crickets chirping and Gus snoring at the foot of the bed. They spend the rest of the growing season toe-curlin' on the regular, soaking each other up before Angie goes away to Montréal for university.

The time apart is good for both of them, but it is a strain. They call every night at first, but by the end of the first year that no longer suits either of them. They're both so busy that it's difficult to genuinely _connect_ for fifteen minutes over the phone. Their conversations are full of the exploits of other people, Angie's new friends and Wayne's reports on his parents, news of how Katy is doing in school in Toronto, all the dumb shit that Darry and Squirrely Dan do and say. Breaks between terms and long weekends become the glue holding their relationship together. Things get real brittle for a while when Angie decides to stay in Montréal over the break between Spring and Summer terms her second year. Wayne offers to come to her, but she declines, saying that she has plans with her friends. He's surprised by two things: one, that they've drifted this far apart in the first place, and two, that he's not as upset about it as he ought to be. He's angry that it's come to this, that he'd tended this garden only to watch the fruit wither on the vine, but he's not necessarily mad about Angie in and of herself.

Wayne asks point-blank if they're breaking up since there's no sense dragging it out if they are. Angie at least seems genuinely upset about the prospect and swears up and down that she doesn't want to, but then she suggests maybe they ought to "take a break." Wayne tries to never, _ever_ swear at Angie for the simple reason that he's never _once_ heard Dad swear at Ma or Mumma, but this gets the better of him. He demands to know exactly what the _fuck_ that means and he is not fucking happy with the answer. They have a long not-quite-an-argument about the whys and wherefores of the situation. After a lot of back-and-forth, he very reluctantly agrees and spends the next two weeks stomping around the farm talking to people like he's chewing gravel.

Ma gets tired of his shit and tells him to go visit Katy and quit doing her head in. He spends the entire month-and-a-half with Katy in the city and comes back calmer and more introspective. He and Angie finally see each other again over autumn break and they agree to call the summer wilderness time and draw a line under it, trying for a fresh start. They spend the rest of the break together making up for lost time, so much so that even Katy gets sick of them being all over each other and threatens to turn the hose on them, frozen pipes be damned.

It feels good to slide back into their comfortable patterns, but just because they've decided that their "break" doesn't count doesn't mean they're the same as they were before. Wayne keeps trying to rekindle the early passion of their relationship, but Angie has one more year before she graduates, and being apart is the reason they're in this pickle.


	3. III. AUTUMN

III. AUTUMN.

Everything goes to hell that year. Dad and Ma are killed on a snowy, icy road by a run-in with a moose. Katy quits school and comes home to be with him, Darry goes a bit off the rails, and now Wayne's expected to run the farm like he hadn't been counting on at least another twenty to thirty years before he needed to take over. Thank fucking Christ Dan is there, solid as ever, and after a six-month bender, Darry eventually pulls his head outta his ass and actually deals with his shit instead of drowning his grief in snooters’n such. Uncle Eddie is there for a while, but way before Wayne is ready for it, Ed tells him that he wants the three kids to buy out his interest in the farm so he can head south to Florida, 'cos his bones can't handle another Canadian winter. Ed and Wayne are sitting at the kitchen table for this conversation, shots of rye in front of them, and when Ed brings up Florida, Wayne groans like an overwrought toddler and tiredly droops down to rest his head on the table. He fights the urge to pull his shirt up over his head and hide and wishes the whole fuckin' world would go to hell and let him have some peace for five goddamn minutes.

Angie comes home to all this shit and Wayne is so fucking stressed out ‘cos his mind is humming like a kicked hornets' nest he can barely sleep, let alone get it up for her. When she floats the idea of moving in he issues a _hard no_ without even thinking about it. There's way too much shit to deal with to make a huge change like that. In all honesty, he can't even handle her staying over nights, crowding him in the bed. That makes him even more irritated, 'cos he remembers how much he used to love it and he feels like an absolute shitheel being mad at Angie for no fuckin' reason when she only wants to make him feel better.

The plain fact is though that he just doesn't want anybody except Katy, Darry, and Dan near him or in his fuckin' house right now. And even at that, he can only take so much of Dan awkwardly trying to cheer them all up, or Darry getting all fucked up on whatever it is he's got his nose into at the moment. Wayne can't stop Darry doing it, he's a grown fuckin' man for all that he's also a big dumb baby in size ten wellingtons, but he can abso-fuckin'-lutely put his foot down and tell Dar to keep that shite off the farm.

When Wayne's not doing his best impression of a wolverine with his hackles up he feels like an old crumpled paper sack gone soft and fuzzy with age. He spends more time in Katy's bed curled up with her like they used to do when they were kids than he spends in his own or with Angie. The only time he's even a little bit okay anymore is when he's listening to Katy's slow breathing. Wayne lives for the moment just after waking and before memory comes flooding back when he can forget that his whole world has been turned upside-down. He copes by not coping, just working himself to the bone until he's too tired to speak or think or feel. He comes in from chorin' and eats whatever Katy puts in front of him, helps her clean the kitchen, and they each do three back-to-back-to-back shots of Gus'n'Bru and go to bed. He goes for days without saying a word, hoping that if he's quiet enough maybe the rage in his heart and the furious buzzing in his head will quiet down too. It doesn't work.

Angie gives him space for the first couple of weeks, and he appreciates it. He's not an easy man to love at the best of times, and this is inarguably not that. She brings casseroles, helps around the house, fields all the questions from nosy but well-meaning neighbours, and just generally tries to help make things easier for him and Katy. But as weeks stretch into a month, then two, she becomes frustrated with his withdrawal into himself. She asks him to please stop pushing her away, to let her be there for him because that's what partners are supposed to do.

He's still prickly as a pissed-off hedgehog, but he knows she's right. Wayne makes an effort to open up to her more, to share things with her, to spend time together. Because he's himself though, and he can't ever do anything the easy way, he still can't bring himself to fuck her. There are a couple of frustrating but ultimately unsuccessful attempts, so they go back to Wayne getting her off like in the beginning of their relationship. He feels bad about not being able to give her what she wants, but he just cannot deal with it right now.

They all go out to Modean's for the first time since winter, the first time since the accident. Everyone in the bar is real quiet and respectful, letting them drink in peace. Even Gail gives him a break from the come-ons and innuendoes for the night. Wayne's just about decided that he can handle getting out more if everyone is gonna fuck off and leave him be when a bunch of degens from upcountry come carousing in. He grumbles and slides further down in his seat, scowling like someone's pissed in his cornflakes.

The degens are irritating but there's nothing he's willing to do about it until one of them gropes one of Gail's waitresses and she shrieks, which sets the degens to laughing and trying to do it again. Wayne can't stand that kind of shit, so he stands up and hollers at them to knock it off. Dan and Darry stand behind him, backing him up and shielding the girls. The head degen, who has a neckbeard that looks like a possum could get lost in it, hollers back that Wayne's hick ass should go over there and make him. So Wayne does.

He smashes the dumb fucker's own beer into the side of his head, knocking him right out, and asks if anyone else wants some. Gail tells them to take it outside or she'll personally introduce them all to her cricket bat and then ban them from the bar.

Out back in the car park, it's three-to-one in favour of the degens, so not bad odds. They get into it straight away, except for one brain hero who will not shut the fuck up. Then he mentions maybe showing Katy a good time after they finish beating the hicks' asses and Wayne blacks out.

He comes to with Dan and Darry pinning him hard to the wall next to the empty kegs. All the degens are laid out, silent and bloody. Katy is staring at him wide-eyed and shocked, but what catches Wayne's attention is Angie, hands covering her mouth and looking terrified. Wayne is huffing and puffing like a steam train and only now notices Darry patting his head and asking if he's going be okay. He nods and they ease up off him hesitantly, like maybe he's gonna bolt. He immediately walks over to the girls and makes sure they're fine and absolutely misses the look of concern Dan and Darry share.

Angie and Katy both hug him at the same time, and he wraps an arm around each and notices that for the first time in months his mind is quiet and he feels light. He feels good, actually. Really damn good. Darry suggests maybe now would be an opportune time to go home. Wayne's okay to stay and keep drinking, but since everyone else agrees with Dar, he goes along with them.

That night he fucks Angie three times before she taps out and shoves him off.

After that things settle down into a rhythm. Chorin', eating, going out, drinking, and scrappin'. It's not every night, it's not even every time they go out, but if Wayne don't get into at least two tilts a week he gets as cranky as a bear with a chapped ass. 


	4. IV. WINTER I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Winter kinda got out of hand, and is now three times longer that everything that's happened so far, so I decided to split it up. I plan on reworking this to some extent, adding things and making the first three chapters longer to help balance the story out. Please stay tuned to keep updated!

Wayne and Angie start spending more time at her place, usually on the nights they go out. It's odd for him, being in her space so much. He's never lived anywhere but his own house, never spent much time at anyone else's. He has a Moment when he realises that he has a drawer in Angie's dresser. Even though he sleeps in his own bed half the week she's almost always there with him, and when they're not at his house, they're at hers. They're doing this weird thing where they're essentially living together in two separate places.

Wayne tries to work out how he feels about this but he doesn't know where to start. He's not the most emotionally intelligent fella. He tries a few probing questions with Darry and quickly aborts that mission since Darry's never lived anywhere else either, nor has he ever had what you might consider a long-term relationship, apart from his pet cow. His next thought is Squirrely Dan, who's a thoughtful and considerate guy, but the conversation takes a hard detour when the subject of his and Angie's sex life comes up. It’s not polite to kiss’n’tell.

He goes to Katy, who he honestly should have talked to first since she's the person he's closest to in the whole world and she's a lot better at being with people. It's a little weird talking about this with her but she's really a sensible, practical girl and she just wants him to be happy. If he's completely honest with himself, it's weird talking about his relationship with Angie at all. It makes him miss Dad s'goddamn much. Dad was the perfect person to talk to about stuff like this. He just listened intently at you until you worked shit out for yourself.

Katy learnt from the best though and holds Wayne's hand as he stumbles through the unfamiliar country of his feelings. He definitely doesn't want to move in with Angie. You couldn't pry Wayne out of the farm even if you had a really big crowbar. He still doesn't want Angie to move in full time with them. It seems like too big a step to make too soon after their parents passed. He's still angry and grieving and not in any shape to make a commitment that big, and he likely won't be until he knows he can run the farm without fucking it up. He needs stability. He's lost too much to trust in the permanence of anything, and he is not fucking okay.

By the end, Wayne just wants to curl up and die, or alternatively drink an entire two-six and sleep for a week. That is too many feelings for one person to have. Katy assures him it's the normal amount for such a complicated situation but he doesn't believe her. There's no way all that can fit in anybody's chest.

It leaves him at a bit of a loss as to what to do with his hard-earned conclusions. Should he bring the product of all this god-awful soul-searching up to Angie? Or should he sit with it and see if things change? Should he just wait for her to broach the subject?

Katy asks if he's okay with how things are now, if he would change anything about his relationship or how he divides his time. The answer is no, but he's not sure how much of that is because he's content with how things are or how much is because he hates change. Katy can't answer that for him, only tell him to go with his gut. Wayne is not now nor has he ever been on speaking terms with his gut, which is why he's here talking to Katy.

Since Wayne has no fucking idea what to do, he does nothing and feels like a coward. He simply can't bring himself to disturb the status quo when he's more comfortable than not. Rocking the boat now is just too risky.

Summer fades into fall again, and Wayne and Angie seem like a solid fixture in town. They go to community events, farmers' markets, ag hall meetings, Jamboree. Angie works at the bar, Wayne runs his farm and produce stand. They've been together four and a half years. People around town start asking when they're going to tie the knot which pert near sends Wayne into a panic attack. He can't even ask her to move in with him, _how in the fuck_ is he supposed to ask her to marry him. Thank fuckin' Christ, Angie laughs it off mostly when folks get nosey parkers. Keyword: mostly.

Wayne knows he's fucked when the first bridal magazine shows up at Angie's place. That night he goes out without her; it's just him and Katy, Darry, and Squirrely Dan, and he gets into three separate fights. He wins every one of them, but the last guy was wearing a huge fuck-off class ring. He clouted Wayne hard on the temple, ringing his bell good and proper. His stupid jewellery also tore Wayne's forehead right open, to the point where he had to ask Katy to stitch him up. The others were tough customers too, and all told Wayne ends up in pretty rough shape by the end of the night.

Angie starts dropping more matrimonial hints as winter wears on, and Wayne starts fighting even more than he already was. He starts rolling in with injuries on top of injuries, making Angie upset, and things get pretty frosty between them. At home, Katy, Darry, and Squirrely Dan each take him aside separately to ask him if he's okay.

He's not, and the only time he's at peace is when he's fighting. It's addictive. Everything else fades away and the only thing happening is right in front of him. It's a problem he can fix just by being stronger, tougher, and faster than the other guy, although usually these days it's guys, plural. He fights for the free, wild joy of it, for the blood-pounding, ecstatic sensation of being the last man standing. He loves fighting, always has, loves the roughness and the brutality and the taste of copper in his mouth. Even getting hit feels good in its own way, grounding him in the here and now, connecting him to his body, reminding him he's alive. Wayne loves to fight like other men love to fuck. It makes him want to howl at the moon.

One night just after the new year, he takes on five guys at once, just for callin' him fruity-loops 'cos he had an arm over the back of Dar's bar stool. Darry and Squirrely Dan both try to jump in at different points but Wayne shoves them back and keeps swinging, turning and twirling like a top, fists connecting with everything within arm's reach. He's a hurricane of violence, force five. They try to lay hands on him to halt his mad rotations, to gang up on him and hold him still, but he uses all the momentum he can bring to bear, swinging his whole body around and crashing them into one another like dodge'ems at a fair. He manages to hit one of the fuckers so hard the man literally goes flying into the wall. He puts them down one by one and _by God_ when Wayne puts a man on the floor he fucking stays there.

The last one standing is a huge brute of a man with the face of a grotesque, half-a-head taller than Wayne and half again wider in every direction. He's got a punch on him that would drop a horse, and not one of those sissy Arabian dressage horses neither, but one of the huge dray horses like a Clydesdale or a Friesian. Wayne squares up and gets in a couple good hits in until Big'n'Ugly catches him on an uppercut that snaps his head back and sends him arse over tea kettle to the ground. His head bounces off the icy asphalt as he rolls and he digs his toes down into his boots and levers himself up, still sliding backwards through snow slush and dirt like a goddamn anime character. Wayne launches forward elbow first and drives it in right under Ugly's ribs, winding him so hard he fucking pukes.

Wayne tries to stand and stumbles into the side of the dumpster. He knows what being punch-drunk is like, knows the slick sea-sick sensation of sliding off the sphere of the earth on a serenely solid surface. He doesn't need precise coordinates though, only a general direction.

Vision blurring and rocking back and forth, Wayne gets a lock on Ugly and grabs him by the shoulders, driving his knee up into his already abused solar plexus half-a-dozen times before dropping the larger man to his knees and nutting him so hard they both lose consciousness.

Wayne wakes up and immediately wishes he hadn't. Clearly, he's been run over by a train. Why couldn't he have just died in peace? And where the fuck is he?

He tries to sit up and is assaulted by wave after wave of nausea. Groaning he rolls over and miracle of miracles, there's a bin right there. He dry heaves for an eternity, slow torturous rolls of his muscles clenching and pulling in the wrong order, the wrong direction. Finally his body gives up, too exhausted to continue rebelling, and he almost passes out from relief. He rolls back onto the bed and spots a glass of water and a bottle of aspirin on the bedside table, more precious than the holy grail. He probably drinks too much too quick but he's desperate to get the fistful of pills dissolving quickly and into his bloodstream.

Wayne lays back and takes stock. Head: abominable. His hair hurts. One eye is almost swollen shut and the other refuses to focus, his nose is clogged, one eyebrow feels split, lips are fer sure split, and one tooth is precariously loose. He tongues it back into place and bites down to force it back into the gum. Neck and shoulders: tenderised like skirt steak. He can feel where his muscles are hot and swollen, bruised and abused not just from taking hits, but from how far he's pushed himself past endurance. Chest, back and belly: same as above but with added gut-churning awfulness. Ribs are bruised but probably not broken, thank fuck. Arms and legs, hands and feet: still attached. Possibly strained quads and a boxer’s fracture. Definitely one or two broken toes, knuckles all shredded and busted to shit, but overall not the worst. Other Vitals: seems undamaged. Good enough.

He dozes some more, figures it would be better to sleep through the worst of it. When he has to get up or piss the bed, he creaks and groans like an old wood floor in the winter. There's a robe on the foot of the bed to cover up the fact that he's only in his shorts and it seems familiar. He knows for sure he's not at the farmhouse 'cos every inch of his home is better known to him than his own features, but that's where his certainty runs out.

Opening the door reveals that he's at Angie's. For the first time, he's been put in the guest bedroom instead of hers. Fuck. He shuffles along, one hand on the wall down the hall to the bathroom door.

Further inspection in the mirror over the sink reveals that everything is _so much worse_ than he thought. Black and blue does not begin to convey the ugly rainbow of bruising he’s sporting. His face looks like he went twelve rounds with a gorilla. Everything is puffy and swollen, there’s blood crusted around his mouth and nose, in his hair, sticking his eyelids together. He’s got road rash on half his face. His nose might not ever be the same. He gives the commode a moment’s serious contemplation, but when his vision refuses to resolve into a clear image he decides for the better part of valour and pees sitting down without taking a shit for the first and only time in his life.

He finishes up in the bathroom and walks into the living room to find Angie on the couch. She doesn't say it, but the words _We need to talk_ hang in the air. He sits down next to her and waits.

She says he's got to quit fighting. She asks him to consider what would happen if he got banged up, doing two-to-five for assault. Or what if he got really injured, the kind of hurt that you don't recover from. One bad hit, one wrong landing, or God forbid someone should pull a weapon, and he could be permanently damaged or turned into a vegetable. And what would become of her and Katy then?

The idea of not fighting is utterly alien to him. Wayne's been scrapping since he was knee-high to a grasshopper. It's his first and strongest instinct. What the hell else should he do? Just walk away?

The answer to that is a firm and resounding _Yes_. Walk Away. Don't engage, don't make it his business, don't get involved.

His first thought is _Never_. He'll never stop fighting. The lightness and freedom he feels throwing hands is incomparable. If he lost that he'd lose his goddamn mind. If he's not the toughest guy in Letterkenny then who is he?

There's two things Wayne can do here. One is giving in, doing as Angie's asking him. The other is refusing and facing the consequences. He asks what those consequences are.

She says it'll be over between them. This slow implosion self-destruction Wayne's doing is hurting her. She won't stand by and watch him kill himself a piece at a time.

It's an impossible choice. He can't choose to let her go, but he can't choose to let go of himself either. He can’t think straight for the cacophony in his head. He’s got to calm down, breathe, and sort through this. He needs to talk to Katy. It doesn’t help that his bell’s been rung so hard he can still hear the reverb. The few steps from the door of the bathroom to the couch had been pretty dicey without the wall to help him keep his balance. He needs more sleep, ideally a week’s worth.

When he takes too long to answer, Angie coolly says she’ll call Katy to come pick him up. It’s probably better he goes home to recover and they can talk later.

He has a petty, vicious moment where he wonders why the fuck she even brought it up in the first place, then, but Wayne doesn’t have it in him to argue. He just wants to crawl back into bed and stop feeling all this… _this_ ness, this everything, the hurt and the nausea and the dread that his life is going to shit and there’s nothing he can do about it and still remain himself.

Katy takes one look at his sorry frame and sighs his name. She and Angie work together and get him folded into the front seat of Katy’s little pickup, still wearing only his shorts and the robe. He’s got his jeans and boots with his socks stuffed into them bunched up in his lap, but Angie says his shirt was too all-over blood to save, and besides it was ripped to ribbons anyway. The last thing she says to him is that she’ll call in a couple of days.

Back at home, Katy struggles to get him up the stairs and into bed, even with Wayne helping as much as he can. He keeps listing hard from side-to-side, crossing his feet in front of each other as he takes each step, equilibrium shot all to fuck.

Finally, she pours him into bed and he groans out a sound like the lake ice cracking after the deep winter. Mercilessly, she strips off the robe, lips white and pressed together, and checks him over for any injuries that need immediate attention. Katy’s furious with him, he knows, an altogether different kind of anger and disappointment from Angie’s. She won’t say anything until she’s finished patching him up, so Wayne doesn’t press his luck, does what she wants him to as best he can. He might as well dig his own grave if both the women in his life give him the boot.

She cleans out his cuts and scrapes, debriding an astonishing amount of grit and asphalt from his face and hands. The tiny grains make hideously loud plinking noises as Katy drops them onto the saucer, the only sound in the room apart from their breathing. She stitches a few of the larger cuts and spreads triple antibiotic ointment over all of them. She sets and splints his fingers and toes, taping them to their closest neighbours, and wraps his hands in clean gauze and sports tape. Her hands are firm and cool like a stranger’s, not the warm, healing touch he’s used to from her. Katy’s silence says more than yelling ever could.

The last thing Katy does is fill a big bowl with hot water and washes off the rest of him. Wayne almost falls asleep with her running the washcloth over his scalp, the repetitive motion lulling and relaxing him. He rouses when she brings over a clean pair of shorts and makes him change, because like hell did she clean him up just to let him fester in his nasty, day-old underwear, still stinking of fight-sweat and violent intent. She’s about to stand up and go when Wayne catches hold of her wrist and asks her to stay.

Katy tells him she doesn’t have words for how angry she is at him, speaking for the first time since she said his name at Angie’s.

Sorry isn’t enough, but it’s all he has, and he asks her again to stay.

She takes a deep breath, holds it for a count of four, then lets it go. She tells him she’ll be right back after she’s cleaned up. Katy clears all the debris from her doctoring and carries it away. Wayne listens as she moves around the house, follows what she’s doing on the map in his head. He must be pretty fucked up still ‘cos he actually loses track of her a couple times.

Wayne can’t tell how long it is before Katy comes back, but the shadows in the room haven’t moved much by the time she walks in, dressed in her “comfy pyjamas,” which are really just one of his old t-shirts with the collar and sleeves ripped off and a pair of soft shorts. She sits on the bed facing him, waiting for an explanation.

He apologises again, reaching out for her. She watches his hand but makes no move to take it, and waits until he gets tired of holding it up and lets it fall back to the bed.

Wayne had inherited their Ma’s anger, loud and furious seething with occasional explosions, but easily dealt with and cleaned up. Katy had inherited their Dad’s anger, quiet and hissing, capable of setting everything around it on fire even at a distance, slow and destructive as a lava flow and just as unstoppable.

Katy asks him what the _fuck_ he thinks he’s doing. She tells him about Dan, holding his ball cap in his hands and twisting it in his nervousness, reporting to her the goings-on down at the bar. She tells him about finding Darry in Moonbeam’s stall, crying into the heifer’s shoulder and telling her how scared he is that he’s going to lose another person he loves. She tells him about how she sat up all night, trying to think about what to say to him, only to be unable to come up with anything other than the thunderous static of her rage.

A spark ignites in his battered heart; she feels it too. Wayne tells her about the hornets’ nest in his brain, about the crawling, prickling heat sensation of anger that he feels all the time, about how the only way to exorcise it is in the middle of a donnybrook. He watches the unhappy recognition on her face, torn between unspeakable joy at being _known_ and sorrow that they’re both afflicted with this. Wayne is amazed that even after a literal lifetime, they’re still learning about each other, still growing together.

He reaches out to Katy again and this time she very carefully stretches out alongside of him, pulling the throw blanket up over them from the foot of the bed. She gently slides her arm under his neck so he can fold up into her and hide his face in her shoulder. He does this thing that’s not crying; he just takes huge gulps of air like a marathon runner and tries his best not to shake himself apart into pieces in her arms.

Katy, God bless’er, waits him out, not saying nothing. She just holds him and pets the back of his head and neck until he’s done. He comes back to himself hollowed out, like a pumpkin at Hallowe’en waiting for a candle. As he calms his senses dial in, one by one. Touch, smell, and taste report in first, telling him he’s in the only home he’s ever known, wrapped up in his own sheets, surrounded by his closest companion. Hearing follows close behind; the beat of her heart is his oldest lullaby, the steady rhythm of it under his cheek anchoring him in his own body, the habit of a lifetime making him sync up with her. Sight is the last thing he registers, the pattern of freckles behind her ear a constellation he’s long since had tattooed on his heart.

Wayne stays still, breathing ragged, little puffs of air stirring the rolled edge of Katy’s shirt. Laying tangled up with her he feels safe and warm, whole for the first time in too long. They let the quiet play out, both feeling flayed and raw. He almost falls back asleep, soothed by the feeling of Katy’s fingers carding through his hair and her nails scratching along his scalp and down his neck, but he has to tell her one more thing before their conversation can truly be finished.

Katy presses her lips together and grumbles. She doesn’t like it. It’s too much like an ultimatum. There’s no place in their life for someone who’s gonna hold a relationship to ransom like that. Angie might not be entirely wrong about taking a break from fighting though, at least until he heals up.

Wayne clarifies that’s not what Angie meant. She wants Wayne to stop fighting completely, to give up the title of toughest guy in Letterkenny. For good.

Katy likes that even less and grumbles again. He confesses how torn he is about it, that he doesn’t know what to do, that he’s scared shitless of the consequences either way.

At a loss, Katy says they’ll sleep on it. Angie said she’d call in a couple of days so they have time to make a decision, and no matter what they’ll always have each other. 

There’s so much comfort in the fact that she says _we_ and _us_ instead of _you_ and _I._ Neither of them ever completely shook the habit of always referring to themselves in the plural. Even if they were apart they were never separate, not really. Wayne’n’Katy started life together and that’s how they plan to continue. 

Wayne wakes up stiff and sore all over and disoriented by the darkness outside his window. Katy’s sprawled all over the bed, half on top of him, as usual taking up three times as much room as anyone her size has a right to. He glances over at the clock on the nightstand and thankfully he can read it. He’s still seeing triple, but if he squints real hard he can make all the numbers line up almost right. Right enough, anyway. 19:34. They’ve been sleeping for pert near eight hours. 

He wants to sleep some more, but his belly’s growling and he needs to piss s’goddamn bad. Another dose of painkillers wouldn’t go amiss either. Careful as he can manage, he rolls to face Katy and cups her face in his hand. The easiest way to wake her up has always been to rub her ears, which are crazy ticklish. 

Still asleep, she shakes her head to dislodge his hand. He brushes his thumb across the fold of her ear again and she grumbles and tries to bury her head into the bed between his chest and bicep, as if he couldn’t reach her there. One last time he tries to rouse her, and she smacks his hand away and cusses him before asking after the time and groaning at the answer. 

Wayne is never not charmed by the way Katy is crabby and dishevelled first thing upon waking, so opposite of the Cool and collected self she shows everyone else. Her hair was in a no-nonsense bun when they fell asleep, but now it was a bird’s nest on her head, fluffy wisps of hair escaping and floating up, cloud-like. She has sleep in her eyes and a red mark on her cheek from where she slept smushed up on his shoulder and he _knows_ she drooled on him like she always does, but this is a Katy only he gets to see and it’s precious to him. 

He chokes on his words and the feelings behind them, instead hugging her tight and thanking her. Not for anything in specific, just generally. Katy understands him in a way no-one else does, not even Angie, and hears what he means instead of what he says. She presses their foreheads together and he knows he’s forgiven for worrying her so when she kisses him on the corner of his mouth that’s not all cut up. 

They get up and Katy goes down to the kitchen to fix up some food while Wayne pisses leaning up against the shower stall to keep from falling over. He’s still unsteady on his feet but it’s a vast improvement over his state when they got home. He lays the robe over his back because he can’t lift his arms up to put it on properly and carefully, slowly makes his way downstairs. 

Katy helps him sit down and puts a pan of chicken broth on the stove to warm up and starts some toast when the smell of real food makes him gag. She slides his robe off and examines his ribs, probing and pressing while he breathes in and listening for any telltale wheezing. Under the glare of the kitchen lights she goes over every inch of him, looking for any injuries she’d missed earlier and checking the ones she’s already treated. There’s a blinding flash of pain as he looks up at the light so she can check his pupils and he almost whites out from the agony. 

She holds his head to her chest, apologising and hiding his eyes as he recovers. God, the way Katy calls him _sweetheart_ is like hearing their Ma’s voice come out of her mouth. He breathes heavy and slow, willing his stomach to obey and settle down. When the danger passes he relaxes, smushing his face further into her, exhausted. He definitely needs another pain pill. And to sleep for the rest of the winter. 

She has to let him go to take the pan off the heat and collect the toast. She tips the broth into his favourite mug, the one with Gus’s picture on it, and brings it to him with the toast and a small cup of applesauce and a pain pill. He swallows the tablet first and then cautiously makes his way through the rest of it. He takes tiny nibbles of toast in between sips of broth and small mouthfuls of applesauce while Katy eats the dinner Darry made for them. He even wrote their names on a note and left it for them in the fridge [1].

Darry had apparently elected to stay the night at Mumma’s old trailer ‘cos he was still pretty fucked up about what went down last night. Wayne knows he has to go apologise to Darry, but maybe it can wait until the morning. Wayne almost falls asleep in his applesauce, head nodding even as he tries to put the spoon in his mouth. Katy clears the food and dishes into the sink and then tortures him some more by making him stand up while she wraps his ribs in cling film. He’s so tired and so sore he has to rest his arms on her shoulders ‘cos he can’t hold them up. She helps him slide the robe back on and together they climb up the stairs and go back to bed. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1 Darry leaves them notes all over the house when he thinks they need cheering up, and he draws a little heart in the ‘y’ in each of their names. In his phone they’re saved as ‘Wa❤️ne’ and ‘Kat❤️Kat’.[return to text]


	5. V. WINTER II.

The next morning arrives too soon. Wayne’s still exhausted, every part of him aching and frozen stiff. He spends some long, uncomfortable minutes working loose what joints he can, starts by wiggling his fingers and toes and works up from there. Wrists and ankles, elbows and knees, hips and shoulders slowly come unlocked as he works them as much as he can, given the bandaging they were wrapped in and the dead weight of Katy pinning down one arm.

He pulls Katy closer and she sighs in her sleep. They fit perfectly together, spoons in a drawer, her back to his chest and her head under his chin, a matching set. One day he’ll have to give this up; she’ll settle down with someone, or Angie will pin Wayne down and they’ll get married, but not today. He needs her like a plant needs sunshine, like he needs to breathe. He kisses the top of her head, not caring that her hair is trying to strangle him, breathes her in and holds it as long as he can. Holding her like this makes him feel complete in a way that he doesn’t get from anyone else, not even Angie.

He kisses the freckles behind her ear, an almost perfect copy of the constellation Gemini. Katy hums and presses back into him, letting him know she’s awake. There’s a while left before they have to get up, so Katy turns to face him and holds him until the alarm goes off. Not that Wayne’s in any fit state to do any chorin’, but he gets up anyway and makes his way downstairs with her for breakfast. His stomach feels better, so he eats the toast and broth and applesauce and even manages an egg by the time Darry walks in and grabs a yoghurt from the fridge.

Wayne stands up from the table and calls Darry’s name. All he gets in return is a scared, sceptical look, which, given his recent behaviour, is probably the most he can expect. He apologises, fully and unreservedly, and tells Darry he never wanted to hurt him, or make him feel alone. They’re family, and that’s forever.

Darry puts down the yoghurt and comes around the table to shake Wayne’s hand, mindful of how bandaged up he is. Wayne pulls him in and hugs him, tight as he can with his injuries. Darry’s arms wrap gently around him and he presses his face into the bend of Wayne’s neck and shoulder. After a long moment, Darry makes Wayne promise he’ll never push him away, never scare him like that again. Wayne nods and presses their foreheads together like he does with Katy. Darry surprises him by dipping for a kiss, but it’s not unwelcome. A promise sealed with a kiss is a heavy geis, a weight that will keep him grounded in the here and now, less of a millstone and more a lifeline.

Katy gives them a moment more, then joins their embrace and collects her own kisses from each of them. They’re the only family they have left, and now they have to stick closer together than ever. They hold each other, food forgotten in the face of shared grief, until Wayne starts to lean heavier on them both, tired out just from standing. Darry helps Wayne walk to the recliner in the sitting room while Katy sets up a tray for the rest of his breakfast. After they get him settled in with some ice packs they finish breakfast on the hoof and get to chorin’.

Wayne naps the rest of the morning and only wakes when Katy lets the screen door swing shut as she comes in to cook lunch. He calls her name as his head snaps up from where he was snoring against the headrest and he grimaces at the sharp stab of pain behind his eyes. She tuts over him as she checks his pupils again. They’re pretty even, but given the number of times Wayne’s had his clock cleaned lately, she’s still concerned. She brushes the back of her hand across his forehead, relieved that at least there’s no fever or any signs of infection. The pissy, rubbish-filled carpark behind Modean’s is brimming with bacteria, most of it likely unknown to science. She tells him to rest some more while she gets lunch together and takes his tray back to the kitchen.

Darry comes in a short while later and heads straight for the sink to scrub his hands before peeking in to check on Wayne. Wayne tells him bluntly that he feels like ten kilos of shit in a five-kilo sack. Well, there’s not much to say to that other than offering sympathy Wayne won’t take kindly to, so Darry retreats to the kitchen and leans up against the counter next to Katy in front of the stove. He asks her how long Wayne’s likely to be out of commission.

She bites her lip before speculating four to six weeks, on account of his ribs and the bones she suspects are actually broken.

That’s a lot of chorin’ for him and Squirrely Dan to cover, expecially what with the calving coming up, and the work they have to do to get ready for Spring planting. They usually hire a hand or two to help out around that time, so they decide to call the Ginger and Boots early this year.

Darry does some awkward shuffling and fidgeting before lowering his voice to a murmur and asking Katy how she’s holding up. He knows this hasn’t been easy for her, knows he should be helping out more, but Wayne’s kinda unpredictable about what he’ll tolerate from Darry and what he won’t.

Katy sighs and bites her lip again. She whispers back that truth be told, she’s a bit of a wreck. When Wayne told her what Angie said about him killing himself piecemeal, well. It stuck with her. It has the uncomfortable ring of truth about it. Wayne’s not okay and Katy for once in their life has no idea how to make it better.

Darry rests his hand in the dip of her waist and rubs a thumb across her ribs, telling her that they’ll figure it out together.

Katy smiles and tells him he’s a good brother and leans over to kiss him. He settles in against her, sets his other hand so he’s spanning almost her entire waist. It feels good to lean on his strength instead of being the one leant on. Darry of all people knows how strong she is, so to have him kiss and hold her like she’s made of spun glass drives home how fragile she really feels. For a moment she allows herself to go soft and pliant, sighs out his name, drawing him in and clinging. He kisses her sweetly once, twice, three times, until he can feel her start to smile again.

She stiffens up and draws away when she smells the food start to burn so Darry lets her turn her attention back to the stovetop and stands behind her, drawing her hair back off her neck and kissing the freckles behind her ear like Wayne does. Keeping one eye on the pan, Katy leans back into him again as he holds her and trails loud, smacking kisses down her neck to her shoulder and back up again. Then, just to be a shit, he kisses her ear where she’s ticklish and calls her _Cara mia_ in his most sincere Raul Julia impression.

Well of course that sets her to giggling, so Darry ups the ante by grabbing her waist again and lightly digging his fingers in until she’s shrieking with laughter and helplessly trying to bat him off with the spatula. Wayne hollers at them from the other room to be considerate of a dying man who can’t join in the fun.

Katy reminds Wayne in colourful language that his current situation is entirely of his own making, and he can button his lip. From the confines of the recliner, he declaims at length on the cruelty of their behaviour irrespective of circumstances and the actions that preceded them. Darry shuts him down by stating in a deadpan fashion that if Wayne is jealous, then Darry is more than happy to come in there and do to Wayne what he’d been doing to Katy. Wayne grumbles about kicking a man when he’s down and other such injustices.

Katy sends Darry in to fetch Wayne to the table while she dishes up lunch. They eat in easy silence, occasionally bumping feet under the table. It’s okay for Darry and Katy, who are wearing boots, but Wayne’s feet are bare, and soon they’re streaked with mud.

When they’re done with lunch, Wayne announces that he’s in the mood for a Puppers and a dart. Katy forbids it immediately, citing his obvious concussion, his busted ribs, and the fact that booze and darts have a measurable negative impact on healing. Wayne grouses about the fact that he’s a grown man and can make his own decisions. Katy fires back that he’s lucky she let him out of bed at all.

Darry, content to watch the two of them volley back and forth, giggles at the ambiguity. Both of them glare at him and enquire as to what it is he finds funny about the situation. He tries to gently suggest that perhaps Katy’s phrasing could be improved upon, but Wayne doubles down on his squint and tells him to take twenty percent off while Katy bemoans the fact that he’s _such a fuckin’ degen sometimes, Darry, I swear to God._

They chirp each other good-naturedly until Wayne’s eyelids start drooping again and he struggles to keep them open. Katy takes him back upstairs to bed and cleans the mud off his feet before tucking him in. Maybe the fatigue is making him petulant, but he refuses to go to sleep until she lays down next to him and gives him a kiss, like trying to get a toddler to take a nap. She stays with him until he’s asleep and then goes back downstairs to find Darry finishing up cleaning the kitchen.

It’s a sweet gesture, and deeply appreciated, so Katy winds her arms around Darry’s neck and holds him tight, forehead to forehead. They use the time until afternoon chorin’ to plan dinner, call the Ginger and Boots, and play a couple rubbers of cribbage. Katy quietly asks Darry if he’ll be staying tonight. Hedging, he asks her if she wants him to. Tangling their fingers together, Katy admits that she does. She could use the help with Wayne, true, but she mostly just wants the three of them to be close, like when they were young.

She starts dinner and Darry goes upstairs to shower and wake Wayne. After they eat, they watch a movie all squished up together on the loveseat in the front room, Katy on one side and Darry on the other, with Wayne laid across them both like an oversized cat. She idly pets his hair until he rips a huge snore in her lap, so she decides it’s bedtime. Between her and Darry, they wrestle him upstairs and into bed, and then crawl in after, bracketing him on either side. It’s the best night’s sleep any of them had since last winter.

Before dawn, Darry gets up to do the chorin’, sliding out of bed and leaving them each with a kiss and a cold spot that makes Wayne grumble in his sleep. Katy dozes off and on until it’s time for her to cook breakfast. She lets Wayne sleep and showers before going downstairs.

Eventually Wayne opens his eyes, blinking against the new morning light, and knows what he has to do. He doesn’t want to, it feels like cutting off his own arm, but there’s really no alternative. There never was. He pulls on his robe and slides his phone into the pocket before going down to breakfast.

If either Katy or Darry notice his mood, neither comments on it, but he’s feeling a bit clingy in the face of what he’s about to do. He drags Katy back upstairs after Darry goes out to finish the morning chorin’ and lays with her in the bed, trying to figure out how to tell her what he’s decided.

He dithers so long that the choice is taken from him when his phone rings. Angie’s name pops up on the caller I.D. and Katy makes to get up when Wayne pulls her back and lays his fingertips on her lips as he answers the call. He puts Angie on speaker phone and they exchange greetings.

She asks him how he’s doing, so he goes through the list of injuries, tells her he’s been sleeping a lot. She offers to come over but he tells her Katy and Darry are looking after him so it’s not necessary. Angie huffs a sigh over the phone and asks if they should address the elephant.

Wayne gives her the go-ahead, so she jumps right in and asks if he’s thought about what she said. Wayne heaves a sigh of his own and tells her it’s practically all he’s thought about. He apologises for hurting and scaring her. He hints obliquely at how hard it was to make a decision, but in the end, he tells her he’ll stop fighting. Katy almost gives herself away by gasping, but Wayne covers it up with a little cough.

Angie says she’s glad to hear it, ‘cos she loves him and she wants him to get better. After a long pause, she asks if they can talk about when they’re gonna get married.

Katy stares at him, eyes huge and round as he says he doesn’t want to have that conversation over the phone. Irritated, Angie asks him when he _does_ want to have that conversation. She’s tired of dancing around it. People are starting to talk.

Wayne bites back his first answer of _the day after Never_ and says instead that people can mind their own beeswax. He has her work schedule memorised, but asks her if she’s free on Saturday anyway. That gives him the rest of the week to come up with another way to dodge the conversation. Angie says she’ll make it work.

They run out of things to say after that. They stay on the phone for a little while longer anyway, but awkward attempts at conversation aside, there’s simply nothing left to talk about. Angie tells him she’s got to go, but she loves him and they’ll talk again soon. There’s another expectant hush and then Wayne says he understands and politely rings off.

Silence between Wayne and Katy is never awkward, but right now it sure is fraught. Wayne struggles to talk about his feelings at the best of times, constantly torn between _too much_ and _not enough._ He relies on Katy to help him with these things. Wayne and Angie have said the _L-word_ out loud several times. To each other, even. So he can say it, it is possible. That very fact, by its nature, renders the lack of reciprocation conspicuous by its absence.

Wayne lets all the tension he was holding onto drain away, going limp and heavy on top of Katy and hiding his face in her neck. She wiggles around until he’s not squishing her so much and asks, breathless, why he didn’t say it back.

He tries to answer her but his voice seizes up, burning and catching on itself, dry and sticky. He swallows a couple times, trying to force the word out, but he just barely manages to breathe _can’t,_ throat clicking. He can tell Katy understands because her breath catches and he can feel her heart skip a beat.

Then why stay with her? Why give up so much of himself?

Somehow, the answer that he doesn’t want to be alone is insufficient. He never lies to her, who can see through him like glass. He’s telling her the truth, but not the reason behind it. There’s a fine line between drawing Wayne out of himself and pushing him too far, so she’s careful as she kisses his forehead and says _Tell me_.

He looks her in the eye and says he knows that one day she’ll meet someone. Someone she wants to be with, and she’ll leave him. When it happens, he doesn’t want to be alone.

Wayne knows it seems a bit cold-blooded, keeping Angie in his back pocket like that. But because Katy knows him, better than he knows himself, she understands what that actually means. He could never be with someone he didn’t actually care for, so on some level he does have feelings for Angie. They just don’t quite match up with Angie’s feelings for him.

So, so gently, Katy holds Wayne’s face in her hands, rubs her thumbs over his cheekbones. She tells him it’s not too late, he can change his mind, he doesn’t have to do this, shouldn’t have to cut bits off himself to fit into a relationship. She’s not going anywhere, she’ll always be with him. He doesn’t need to worry about being alone.

Wayne shakes his head and levers himself up enough to press their foreheads together. He whispers her name in a broken voice and says that he made a promise. Wayne feels not just like he’s betrayed himself, but like he’d given away something that did not belong to him. He should have talked to Katy first. She would have talked him out of it. Now he’s stuck between a rock and a hard place; he either has to go back on his word or go forward in a relationship that requires him to deny a fundamental part of himself. Either way, he is diminished.

And like a moron without two brain cells to rub together, he’d told Angie he didn’t want to have that conversation over the phone, which means Katy can’t be there to help him. The fact that she hadn’t been much help for this conversation was entirely his fault since he couldn’t bring himself to sack up and tell her what he was thinking.

He’s always been so _restrained_ in how he touches her, well aware of how strong he is, how easy it would be to injure her. Even as toddlers, he was meticulously careful to be gentle with her. Now the dam is washed away as he grips her tight, fingers digging in, holding on like he’s trying to keep from drowning. Wayne wants to dissolve, to crawl inside her and disappear, hiding until this all goes away. His gut rises and churns like he’s gotta spit and he’s shaking like the last leaf on a tree, ready to fall.

He ducks his face back down into her neck, hyperventilating, digging his toes into the mattress for purchase as he pushes his whole body into her like he can meld them together through sheer will. He doesn’t even realise he’s whispering over and over against her skin that he doesn’t want this, begging for her help in tiny, hiccoughing _please_ -es. All the pain that he should be feeling from his wounds is subsumed into the howling agony in his chest of what the future holds for him.

His only saving grace is that Katy holds him just as fiercely tight, raking her fingers through his hair and wrapping around him as much as she can. It doesn’t matter that he’s crushing her, not when she draws him in and won’t let go, clutching him like a lifeline. She whispers reassurance into his ear, only half of which he actually hears. The rest is just the sound of her voice wafting around him like the adults in the Peanuts cartoons and the rhythm of her heart against his.

Eventually he exhausts himself, his body giving up and presenting cheques he can’t cash. They breathe together for a little while, processing what all just happened. Katy watches his face while he stares at her mouth, too flayed and raw for eye contact. He counts the beats under his cheek and by the time he reaches a hundred he feels fragile and empty, but calm. Zoned out. Floaty. Like a ghost, everything washes over him and through him, and nothing hurts because his body isn’t real. There is no colour left in the world, everything washed out by cool winter sunlight. His room feels like a stranger’s, the clutter of _stuff_ familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, like he’s temporarily stepped into someone else’s life. He’s so far away, a kite on the end of a fraying string.

The only bright spot in the world is Katy, the only warmth he feels is where she’s touching him. With the mercy of a saint, she covers his eyes as she presses a kiss on him, breathing life back into his lungs. Cell by cell he wakes up, growing heavy again, fingers and toes tingling and hyper-aware of every thrumming pulse point. Sensation returns, crawls up his limbs and pulls him back into his body. The more he feels connected to her, the more real he becomes. She’s his North Star, his lodestone, guiding him home to her.

By the time he’s fully present again, he’s completely drained by the whole ordeal. Wayne knows that Katy has to get up and get on with her day, but he asks her to stay until he’s asleep anyway.

Of fucking course she’ll stay, and she’s a little insulted he felt he had to ask. They get comfy and crawl under the covers to wrap around each other. Katy pillows his head over her heart and breathes deep and slow. He falls asleep almost instantly.

Wayne doesn’t so much as twitch when Katy finally gets up. He sleeps through lunch too and wakes disoriented and ravenous. He stumbles downstairs to find Darry and Katy arguing with equanimity over cribbage and dinner plans. He settles uncomfortably in his chair, huffing out a painful breath. Katy slides him a pain pill and a mug of tea with a hard look, so he keeps his trap shut and does what he’s told. At some point soon, he’s going to have to get back on schedule, knock off all this sleeping during the day and get back to work. If he didn’t think he’d get brutally bollocked by Katy, he’d try to get some things done tomorrow. Nothing heavy-duty, he’s not that stupid, but there’s so much shit that needs doin’ around the farm, always is.

The rest of the day just sorta… happens around him. He can’t seem to concentrate on anything for more than half a minute before his mind jumps the tracks and he’s replaying _that fucking conversation_ over again. He doesn’t mean to ignore Darry and Katy, in fact he wants their attention and comfort, but he can’t help his imagination running through endless repetitions and permutations of _that fucking conversation;_ too-late offerings of alternative replies and phrases and stratagems to escape the briar patch he’d thrown himself into.

 _Too little, too late, you useless sack of goo,_ he thinks venomously. Brains are overrated anyway. His is certainly no picnic, making too many of the wrong connections and not enough of the right ones, glitching out when he can least afford it, betraying him. Wayne idly wonders about how much brain he needs exactly to keep living, how much he could cut out and still keep himself upright and operational, but numb and unaware, like an automaton. It holds a certain appeal. He’d watched a documentary once about brain injuries. There’d been a fella working in a steel factory when an accident embedded something like a railroad spike in his head, right through his skull and out down below his jaw. The unfortunate man lived, an industrial lobotomy case; never the same, but a life nonetheless. If something like that happened to Wayne, he could probably survive, for a while at least. Angie would do whatever it took to keep him alive, spooning him baby food and changing his diapers. Katy, and Darry for that matter too, would put a pillow over his face. He knows which he thinks is the kind thing to do.

He hears again the yawning silence after Angie’s voice telling him she loves him. Wayne can’t parse what he’s feeling, it’s all too jumbled up to make any sense of it. When he thinks of them breaking up, he goes cold all over and the only noise is the screaming void where he doesn’t say anything during _that fucking conversation._ Could he live with himself, never saying it back to her? Could he live with lying, saying it when he’s not sure it’s true?

His train of thought stalls out there and jumps the tracks again, back to the way _that fucking conversation_ blew right past how difficult his decision was. It was what Angie wanted to hear, so why should she look a gift Wayne in the mouth? It doesn’t sit right with him, though. If one of his friends was wrestling with a problem, he’d talk it out with them. God knows he regrets that policy when Dan starts talking about his love life sometimes, but Wayne still does it. But Angie had just accepted his struggle as her due. The presumption bothers him. What else would she expect from him?

Well, marriage, _duh._ Which is why they’re in this pickle. He physically can’t think about _that fucking conversation anymore,_ so while the three of them are watching telly after dinner Wayne contrives to be sandwiched between them, laying across the loveseat that hasn’t fit all of them together since before they left high school. He pulls Darry down in front of him and lays half on top of him, just like he pulls Katy over him like a duvet. Being surrounded by them he feels safe, shielded from the rest of the world.

He doesn’t say a word all night, doesn’t need to. Katy always was the spokesperson between them. Neither she nor Darry press him for anything, they simply make things happen. At bedtime they all go upstairs and crowd in like the night before. Even though it’s probably not good for his ribs, Wayne works his way down to the bottom of the puppy pile so he’s buried under Katy and Darry again. He still feels too exposed, so he pulls a pillow over his head to cover his eyes. The weight on top of him is comforting, anchoring him in the world. He feels less like he’s a cork bobbing in the ocean, no land in sight. He keeps hold of them the entire night, moving when they move to maintain contact. This means he only dozes sporadically, but in the morning he feels better rested than he has in a year.


	6. VI. WINTER III.

Wayne waits until Squirrely Dan shows up for chorin’ to make his announcement. It’s met with the expected amount of incredulity and derision it deserves, but Katy’s quiet, serious confirmation quickly puts an end to all the protestations. Dan changes gears to being a supportive friend pretty quick, but Darry, by virtue of having known Wayne for pert near their entire lives, takes a bit longer to come around. He keeps glancing at Katy as if any moment she’ll jump up and shout, _ha-ha, got you, so gullible!_ It keeps not happening though, and then Darry’s face settles into an expression that says he’s got some questions, but he’s gonna hold on to ‘em for a while before asking. 

At this point in his recovery, Wayne’s got a bad case of ants in his pants. He’s twitchy and irritable with the need for a dart and something to do. Katy still won’t let him so much as clear the table after meals, which he’s been doing since they were four. In the interest of keeping him from driving her nuts, she drags in the laundry and deigns to allow him to help her fold it. Tricky business with his hands bound as they are. Still, it keeps him occupied for a while. 

After she puts the laundry away, she decides to check on his injuries. They run through some stretches and she makes a note of what and how much he can move freely. Most of the swelling has gone down, but he’s still tender and sore all over. The cuts and scrapes have all scabbed over and are starting to get itchy under the sutures and bandages. She makes him sit by the sink while she runs the hot water and scrubs him with a washcloth again. He wants to protest that he can take a shower, but there’s too many bits of him that can’t get wet, like the stitches and splinted bones, and there’s too many spots he can’t reach right now without doing himself further injury. Once he’s dried off and re-wrapped, he’s tired enough that just sitting in front of the telly sounds bearable. 

They talk about what Wayne’s gonna say to Angie. Katy seems to be holding something back from him, and when he asks, she just says that whatever he wants to do, it’s his decision and she’ll back him up a hundy-p. 

From where he’s sitting, his options seem limited: shit or get off the pot. Either he proposes, which he _does not want to do,_ or he’s got to find a way of putting her off the idea. Telling her _No_ is right out; she’ll definitely give him the heave-ho for that. He genuinely does want to be with her, maybe even for the long haul, but even if everything in his life right now was perfect, he’s still not sure if he would want to get married. Something about it seems so final, so indelible. Like if, God forbid, it didn’t work out, he could never go back, never recover or be the same. He flat out refuses to go into a marriage with the thought that divorce would be an option; _whoops, we made a mistake, here’s an easy fix._ There’s no backdoor loopholes for commitment. You’re either all in or you’re not. 

Instead he has so much responsibility that he never asked for, and he’s holding his stupid fucking life together with his bare hands. If he loses one more thing, even one more, he doesn’t know how he’s gonna cope, if he even can. He’s not ready to add another complication to his already over-full plate, to be pulled in yet another direction. All his effort and attention is taken up by the farm, by keeping his family together, keeping a roof over their heads and food in their bellies. There’s just not enough of him left to give away another piece. 

The rest of the week is spent going ‘round and ‘round, circling back on what he’s going to say, fretting over his arguments and reasoning, trying to poke holes and look for flaws and counterarguments. Dan keeps telling him everything’ll be fine, it’ll all work out for the best. Darry doesn’t understand why Wayne won’t just break up with her, but ever since Angie had once tried to come between their friendship Darry had kept his distance from her. 

He wants, oh _how_ he wants, for Katy to just tell him what to do, what the right thing is. She refuses, telling him that it’s his relationship and she can’t be _kibitzing_ for him all the time. 

_When a man asks for help, ya help him,_ he tries. Why won’t she help him with this, when he needs her most?

She flies into a fury, hissing and spitting like a cat what’s had its tail stepped on. She has done nothing _but_ help him. She has bent over _backwards_ trying to help him and how _dare_ he say otherwise. She so rarely gets actually angry at him, twice in a week is too much; it’s like a slap in the face. 

Thus shamed and chastened, he hangs his head and admits she’s right and apologises. He spends the rest of the evening being extra sweet to her, trying to make up for what he said. It sticks in her craw though that he would think that she would ever do anything other than help him. There’s not a lot he can do right now, invalid that he is, but he does his poor best to pamper and spoil her. About half the time, she snaps at him to sit down before he does himself a mischief, but the other half she tolerates with grudging grace. Likely he’ll be out of the doghouse by morning, but he still brings her a cup of tea and a biscuit without being asked. She does let him brush her hair for her, something they haven’t done since they were 17, and he strokes the brush across her scalp until his hands cramp. 

That night as they go to bed, she’s cold to him, facing away from him and kicking his shins when he tries to get close to her. Darry, cognisant of the tension between them, had strategically withdrawn back to his room, so the bed feels bigger than it actually is. He leaves her be, but stretches out a hand toward her just in case, laying it a couple of centimetres away from her back. 

Wayne apologises again, he knows she’s only ever looked out for him and he doesn’t deserve it. Katy sighs, tells him to hush and they’ll talk in the morning. Tomorrow is Saturday, D-day, so they need to be well-rested and on the same page. 

He acquiesces, resigned to his fate, and watches as her breathing slows into the familiar pattern of sleep. Once she’s out, he’s not long for it, lifelong habit kicking in and dragging him under almost against his will. Throughout the night, Wayne shifts and rolls over, back and forth, waking each time. He lays awake staring at the ceiling in between, eyes gritty and stinging. Facing Katy again, his stomach sinks as his eyes follow the line of her shoulders and his arms ache. She sighs in her sleep and scoots back into him, and he feels like a weight has been lifted. All at once his muscles loosen up and his joints unlock from their frozen positions. Like magnets, they align themselves and pull tight together. Finally, he sleeps.

When Wayne opens his eyes, Katy’s already awake and messing up his hair, raking it back and making the strands stand on end. He’s flat on his back and she’s on top of him, pointy little chin digging into his breastbone and feet laying alongside his, keeping her weight off his chest. He gathers her close, wrapping his arms tight around her, and spends a few minutes lovin’ on her the way he wasn’t allowed to do last night. She protests about his ribs but he ignores it, ‘cos the weight of her is nothing compared to the weight of the emptiness of not holding her. He needs all his strength for today, and she’s always been the foundation of him, the bedrock on which he was built, the solidest place for him to stand. 

He could almost fall back asleep like this, warm and wrapped together, sharing the same pillow, but they both need to get up and face the day. She has to help him get dressed, ‘cos he still can’t raise his arms up all the way and doing up the buttons on his clothes is pert near impossible with his fingers taped together. As she slips his shirt on and helps him with his jeans and boots, it’s like he’s putting on armour for a battle. Wearing real clothes for the first time in a week puts a protective layer between him and the world, makes him feel more put together and stronger than he is. He wets and combs down his hair, smoothing out the cowlicks Katy had ruffled it into, and works some gel into it to keep the fringe in a straight, tidy line. Every step he completes getting ready brings another part of him back online, restores him a little more to the man he once was, like a training montage in a movie. 

Katy serves up a big breakfast, encouraging him to eat as much as he can. He’ll need the energy. After Darry goes out to do the chorin’ the two of them sit around, waiting, until they can hear the crunch of Angie’s car coming up the gravel laneway. Katy gives him a kiss for good luck and disappears upstairs, leaving her door on the latch. Angie comes in and Wayne offers her a coffee, dragging things out as long as possible. A part of him still believes that maybe he can avoid doing this.

Angie opens fire immediately, putting paid to that vain hope. She lays it all out for him: she wants to get married. They’ve been together since high school, it’s time their relationship moves forward. They’re adults now, and Wayne owns the family farm. He’ll need help running it, and he’ll need someone to pass it on to, eventually. 

His eyes narrow at that. He’s told her before how he feels about kids, and that’s not changed. It’s a big assumption to make, equating marriage with having children. He doesn’t feel bad reminding her of that. And just because they’ve been together since they were kids doesn’t mean they’re ready for marriage and all it entails. He’s certainly not. The farm’s in a precarious situation; they’re still paying bills from the funeral last year and they’ve had to replace some heavy equipment, including buying a new truck after his parents crashed into that moose. He can’t afford a wedding right now. 

Angie replies that it’s never a good time, and if they wait for everything to be just right they’ll be waiting forever. Something’s always gonna come up. They shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good, here. 

Wayne’s not too sure on the _good_ part, but says instead that they’re young; they have time. Why not take it? What’s the rush? 

She points out that most of her friends have gotten married, and some even have kids already. They’ve all managed to settle into adult life just fine. She doesn’t want to be left behind, stuck treading water when everyone she knows is moving forward. She wants a future, and she wants it with Wayne. 

His hands grip his thighs tightly where they’re laid flat. He’s not like those other people, and it’s not fair to compare him to them. They all still have their parents, for a goddamn start. He has different challenges than they do, and once upon a time Angie accepted that, understood that. Her friends could all go play in traffic, he doesn’t give a care, and he sure as heck wouldn’t follow them into it. 

Uneasy quiet settles around them for a moment before Angie asks him if he still wants to be with her. 

It’s a stupid question. Would he have given up fighting because she asked him to if he wasn’t committed?

Angie shrugs and asks then where do they go from here? 

Wayne looks up at the ceiling and blinks compulsively, a grimace on his face. He needs time. Time to get the farm back in the black, time to settle down in the sudden absence of his parents, time to think about the future. He doesn’t have the luxury of rushing in where angels fear to tread. He’s got to think about Katy, Darry, and Squirrely Dan. They’re all counting on him, and he has to pay that back by being as good as he can be. He has to put his family first. 

Her mouth opens, then closes, as if she was going to say something but then decided not to. After a long pause she asks how much time he thinks he’ll need. 

He doesn’t know, is the honest answer that he doesn’t give her. Instead he hedges, suggests they talk about it again after the summer when he’ll have a better idea of what the year’s yields will be. He can’t promise anything, but they’ll revisit the subject then. 

Angie asks him to look at her. He turns his face and stares at the top of her left ear, hands circling in nervousness under the table where she can’t see them. It seems good enough until she says that she understands, and he gets the impression that somehow she’s talking about something else, but he doesn’t know what. 

Wayne asks if they’re good, if things can go back to normal now. 

She stops in the middle of gathering her things and _looks_ at him again as if mentally reevaluating. Nodding slowly, she says sure, they’re good. For now. 

_For now_ is such a small phrase, but it weighs a tonne, warps the reality of the kitchen around it with its gravity. Wayne’s dug himself into a deep, dark cavern of a hole he had not anticipated, _fuck,_ the bottom’s dropped out and he’s sliding down one of those covered corkscrew slides like at the waterpark, the one he refused to go down ‘cos he couldn’t stop imagining getting stuck. 

He snaps back when Angie lays a gentle hand on his arm and tells him she has to go. She’d seen him go away inside his own head and she’d brought him back. Maybe she does still understand him. 

They say goodbye and make plans for another phone call and relief floods into him when she smiles and goes out the back door instead of trying to kiss or hug him. If he was a hedgehog every quill would be standing on end. He’s jittery and shaky with adrenaline and he needs a fuckin’ drink. 

He about-faces to the pantry and finds Katy already there, whiskey already poured. She’d tip-toed out of her room on sock feet to sit on the stairs and listen to the whole conversation, as agreed. Two robotic steps take him to the counter and they down the shots, double tap on the counter. He immediately goes for another one and she puts her hand over the top of the bottle, asks him if merely kicking the can down the road is a viable long-term strategy. 

What the hell else can he do? He’s got two objectives: number a, don’t get hitched; and number b, don’t get dumped. They happen to be self-contradictory, but hey, who ever said relationships were easy?

Katy would very much appreciate if he didn’t take that tone with her, and he’d better not for one minute think he could get away with avoiding the question. 

Wayne shrugs, helpless. He doesn’t know what to _do._ This was the best he could come up with. If he gives Angie an answer one way or the other then he’ll end up in the exact spot he doesn’t want to be in. 

Wayne’s made the play; the only thing for Katy to do is back him up. 

Over the next few weeks Wayne builds his strength back up again under Katy’s careful supervision. He’s not particularly suited to housework, but he’s gotta start somewhere. After mopping the floors for the third time in a week, he understands Katy’s attitude to barn clothes and especially boots being in the house. He’d never realised what a mess they made until he was the one to clean it up. 

While they’re making dinner he floats the idea of maybe getting someone in to help her with the house once a week or so and she looks at him like he’s grown another head. Who’s got that kind of money? Not them, that’s for sure. But she is gonna take advantage of having another pair of hands for her chores, and she puts him to work as much as he’s capable of. At first it’s just chopping vegetables and folding laundry, stuff he can do whilst seated, but his patience quickly wears so thin it’s see-through, so she upgrades the physical demands of his tasks until he’s wholesale moving furniture for her. Once he’s doing that there’s no real reason he can’t do his regular chores, but he finds he does like cooking with her in the evenings, so that becomes part of their routine. 

Eventually his strength returns, stitches come out and bandages come off, and he’s up and running by the time the calving starts. Valentine’s day is coming up, and he feels like he should make some sort of _gesture_ for Angie. It seems like the sort of thing that normal people do. 

He asks Katy for advice. She agrees that it’s a good idea and suggests that he take Angie on a proper fancy date, not in town, but in the city. Dinner and a show, that’s the ticket. 

Wayne does some googling and finds a production of _Godot_ being put on by a touring theatre group. He loves Beckett, and _Godot_ is _hilarious_ , so he buys a pair of tickets and calls Gail to make sure Angie has the night off. Next, he looks for a restaurant near the venue and finds one that he and Katy had gone to during the summer he’d stayed with her. It’s a real white tablecloth kind of place, where you have to wear a jacket or they won’t seat you. He’d liked the food, so he calls and makes reservations. 

Angie hesitates on the phone when he tells her about the plans he’d made, so he asks if it’s okay. She says it’s fine, she’s looking forward to it. He asks her to wear something really nice and texts her the restaurant’s website. 

Wayne puts on the suit he’d worn to prom, but it doesn’t fit right anymore. The shirt doesn’t meet in the middle and it tore under the arms when he shrugged it on, the trousers are straining across his thighs and he can’t close them around his waist, the jacket pops a couple of stitches and makes him lurch a bit around the shoulders. He shows Katy to see if she can do anything to alter it for him and she laughs herself sick. It does appear he’s filled out quite a lot since the last time he’d worn the suit. Before he can stop her, she takes a picture on her phone and sends it to Darry, who texts back a baker’s dozen cry laughing emojis. Well, if your siblings can’t rip the piss outta ya, who can? 

Katy takes him shopping for a new suit and makes him try on six of the damn things before she deems one acceptable. He thinks it makes him look like a Dorito on stilts, but she tells him that Angie is sure to appreciate the effort, and spends the rest of the day calling him _Cool Ranch._ He scowls at her, but it’s rather spoilt by the fact that he can’t help but smile. It _is_ pretty funny. 

The day arrives and Wayne knocks off chorin’ early, washes his truck, has Katy cut his hair, and shaves and showers until he’s squeaky clean. He picks up Angie lookin’ drop-dead gorgeous in a little black dress and they head out to the city. The drive out is mostly quiet, him not having much to say in the general course of things and preferring anyway to keep his concentration on the road. Angie tries to make small talk but Wayne’s never had much use for that sorta business. Dinner’s better ‘cos they can talk about the food and the play, which Angie has never seen nor read. Wayne gives her the most laconic description possible, that it’s about these two dudes waiting for another dude to show up only he never does. He tries to convey the hilarity of the play without giving anything away, but only manages to talk about wordplay and how difficult it is to make a joke work in French and in English. 

They take their seats a polite ten minutes before the curtain and Wayne gets pretty absorbed reading the playbill. Not that he knows jack shit about any of the actors or anything, but maybe he can turn this into a _thing_ for Angie and himself. It’s a real grown-up pursuit, going to the _thee-AH-tah,_ and if they can turn it into a common interest, so much the better. The lights go down and Angie takes Wayne’s hand, so he looks over and smiles at her before turning his attention to the stage. 

His heart sinks when Gogo opens his mouth and starts talking in French. _Oh, fuck._ He leans over to Angie and apologises, he had no idea. Whispering, he asks if she wants to go, maybe they can catch a movie or something. She gently reminds him that she _did_ live in Montréal for three years, she’s picked up a word or two. He asks if she’s sure, and she squeezes his hand in hers and nods. He watches her for a little while, trying to figure out if she’s understanding what’s going on, if she’s enjoying herself, but the neutral expression on her face isn’t giving him any clues. His attention is pulled back to the stage by the first chuckle of the audience at Didi buttoning his fly. He gets drawn in pretty quick after that and spends half the first act trying to stifle his laughter behind his hand after Lucky and Pozzo make their appearance. 

At intermission Wayne buys them a couple drinks and asks what she thinks so far. Angie cautiously ventures that she’d like to see the rest of it before making up her mind. That rattles around Wayne’s brain a little. It shouldn’t be that difficult to figure out if something is funny or not. Either ya laugh or ya don’t. 

The ride home is if anything more awkward than the ride out. Angie stares out the window as if puzzling out the fundamental principles of the universe while Wayne white-knuckles the steering wheel and frets over the ticking time bomb next to him. Whatever she’s gearing up to say won’t be good for him. 

She chooses to speak when they’re fifteen minutes out from her place, asks why he’d told her the play was funny. It’s so far from what he’d expected, not that he’d been expecting anything specific, but it throws him for a loop and he can’t think for a hot second. 

Well, ‘cos it’s _absurd,_ that’s why. In the end, nothing matters; you might as well get in a few gags about erections. 

Angie rephrases: in a play about the futility of the struggle of human existence, the actual characters get so bored they joke about hanging themselves to pass the time. And _for some reason,_ Wayne thought that was not only a) hilarious, but also b) appropriate for a romantic date night. 

Put like that, Wayne finds it difficult not to concede the point. He’s ruined their date. He pulls into Angie’s laneway and apologises again. 

Angie puts her hand on his thigh, bids him wait a moment. Their date’s not ruined. It’s not over yet. They can still make it good. 

Wayne hadn’t planned for this, but he should have seen it coming. He hadn’t brought a change of clothes or anything with him. Angie reminds him that he’s got stuff at her place. He twists his fists around the steering wheel, skin squeaking against rubber in the quiet of the cabin. He turns to ask if she’s sure and she’s _right there,_ warm and soft and pressed up against him, and he makes a noise like he’s been punched in the gut. They haven’t done this since the ban, haven’t touched or fooled around at all during his recovery. It’s the longest they’ve gone without _anything_ since Angie came back from University; even when Wayne wasn’t ‘feeling his best’ he still took care of Angie. 

They kiss long and slow and sweet, almost chaste, a guaranteed way to wind Wayne up until he snaps. Angie tries to draw him out of himself but it’s cramped in the cab of the truck, so they’re hustling inside as soon as he can get out and open the passenger door for her. In Angie’s bedroom they take their time, dragging out the popping of buttons and the lowering of zippers. Wayne slides his lips down from behind Angie’s ear to her shoulder, hooks a finger under her bra strap and eases it off, kissing on the faint red mark left behind. Angie pulls his shirttails free of his trousers and drags her fingernails down his back, sending shivers racing up and down his spine. He lays her out on the bed, his mouth all over her, kissing everywhere at once, wanting to taste everything, desperate. She reaches down to stroke him and he pins her hands over her head, not ready for that yet. 

Wayne kisses along the cup of her bra and presses his thigh up between hers to give her something to grind on. Still holding on to her wrists, he uses his teeth to pull the bra the rest of the way off from where he’d started earlier and latches onto her nipple as soon as he’s got it free. He bites and licks and sucks until she’s squirming to get away from his mouth, then switches sides to do the same to the other aching tit. He can think when he’s got something in his mouth, he can plan how this is going to go. He pulls one hand free to trace down her side and tug her underwear off, sliding the rest of himself down as he works the scrap of lace past her knees and off her ankles. The moment her hands are free they fly to his head, stroking down the side of his face and holding on to the collar of his unbuttoned shirt. 

Groaning, he loses himself in the taste of her, ignores everything in favour of the rhythm of Angie fucking herself on his tongue. He wants her to come like this, riding his face, so he slides two fingers into her and hooks them up and back toward his chin, pulling her against him and making her lose control. If she bucks her hips up she slides her clit rough against his mouth, and if she fucks down onto his fingers he’s pressing right into her g-spot, no mercy. Her hands scrabble around, pulling on his shirt and tie as she’s caught between two points of sensation, trembling with the effort of trying to come and trying to hold off. Wayne holds her on the edge there for long moments until she breaks and cries out as he presses fingers and tongue even harder against her as she shudders under and around him. He sucks and tongues against her clit through her orgasm, prolonging the agony into oversensitivity. If he’s very, very good, he can get her to come again right away. 

Tonight doesn’t seem to be the night for that as Angie shoves his head away and scoots back a couple inches. She does pull him up by the tie to kiss him again, licking her own taste out of his mouth. Usually that would crank his engine zero to one hundred real quick, but his body’s not cooperating. His dick feels… kinda blurry and a long way off, like he’d have to shout to get its attention. He’s rocking a decent semi just from eating Angie out, and maybe if he could do it again he could really get going, but it doesn’t seem likely she’ll let him. Wayne fucks her mouth with his tongue, hopefully a tease of what’s to come and a good way to get the taste of her back. 

He’s chasing something, some feeling or sensation, or maybe just… more of everything. Anything to get him hard enough to make this work. He tries to concentrate on what feels good, but it keeps slipping off his mind like it’s coated with teflon. Angie pulls his tie apart and shoves his shirt down his shoulders, only to be buggered by the cuffs. She giggles as she slips the studs out of the buttonholes and drops his Dad’s cufflinks onto her night table like they belonged there. That of all things manages to hold his attention, the gleam of silver and onyx in a little crystal saucer under an ugly lamp when they should be in a wooden jewelry box with an agate lid on the dresser. Angie’s too busy kissing down his neck to notice his preoccupation, engrossed in getting him naked and teasing him the way he’d done for her. 

When she gets her mouth on his chest he closes his eyes, imagines times from the past when this wasn’t so difficult, flashing brandy-brown eyes and a full, pink smile aimed right at him. It helps, but none of this is going to work unless he gets something in his mouth right now. He picks her hand up from where it’s plucking at his nipple and sucks on her fingers, laving his tongue over them and making them slick. To his immense relief, by the time she gets his trousers undone and her hand in his pants, he’s in an acceptable state. 

Instead of letting her go down on him, he rolls her onto her back and settles between her legs, checking to make sure she’s still wet enough before sliding in. It’s not his most graceful performance, but he’s inside her and fucking her, and that’s what’s important. Wayne hides his face in her neck as he rocks, screwing his eyes shut tight and sucking on her neck to keep him from being too distracted by her moaning in his ear. He slides a hand under her bum to tilt her hips up to a better angle for getting her off and doubles down on the pace, hoping that if he tries hard enough, it’ll get good. 

Angie’s voice is getting louder and she’s getting tighter around him, but there’s still something missing, some connection he’s not making between skin and brain and heart. Everything’s a bit numb like there’s a barrier between them, the world’s thickest condom, only it’s covering his whole body. He can feel himself starting to flag, so he pulls out before she notices and flips her over so he can rail her from behind. They don’t do it like this often because Wayne likes to look at her and kiss her, but right now he’s just trying to finish her off before he loses it entirely. He pounds away, frantic, but it’s still not working and he’s going soft faster than he thought. He pulls out again, slides his fingers in and rubs his thumb over her clit and thank _fuck_ she comes, clamping down on his hand and wailing. 

Wayne bites his lip and works her through it. The second she’s collapsed on the bed he’s up and in the bathroom, hanging a piss, washing off, and gathering up his clothes, making sure he grabs Dad’s cufflinks. He gets dressed and she asks him why, she thought he’d stay the night. 

Only turning halfway to look at her, he tells her he’s gotta get up early tomorrow. It’s not a lie, he has to get up early every morning. He sits on the bed to lace up his boots, kisses her cheek before he stands up to go, and promises to call her later. 

Wayne tears it up getting home and immediately throws himself into the shower. He takes three times longer than usual despite the late hour, trying to scrub off the sensation of what he’d just done. He gives up before he breaks skin, but only barely. The towel is coarse and rough as he dries off and it’s soothing, in a way, to be able to feel again, even if it stings. He gets ready for bed and standing in front of the sink brushing his teeth, the only thing he can see in the mirror is the image of Dad’s cufflinks in the crystal dish by Angie’s bed, looking Wronger than the sun rising in the west and setting in the east. 

He sorts his discarded clothes into their respective hampers and stares at the black and silver studs in his hand once again. It’s gonna bug him all night unless he puts them back where they belong, fixes them in his mind properly surrounded by wood and rock and folded scraps of yellowing paper, mementos from childhood. Wayne plugs in his phone and flips off the lights and goes into Katy’s room to put the cufflinks away. Her room is as familiar as his own, so he crosses the floor silently and picks out the jewellery box by feel, dropping the studs in and closing the lid. 

Katy’s a light sleeper, so even though he’s quiet as a church mouse she still wakes up and calls him over, asking how his night went. 

It went so fucking _puirly_ , and there’s no other way to say it. 

She _tsks_ and makes a commiserating sound, holding up the corner of her blankets to invite him in. Wayne slides in next to Katy and she makes some more sympathetic noises as she lays a hand on his heart. He shivers all over and _yes, this_ was what he’d missed earlier. He’d walked into Katy’s room as Pinocchio with his strings cut, but one touch from her and now he’s a real boy, a whole person whose thoughts and feelings and wants matter. Katy’s hand on him is intimate, knowing, just for him, not for anyone else, a real connection between them. Wayne knows that if Darry were here instead, Katy would touch him differently than she touches Wayne, in a way that is just as individual and unique as their relationship. 

Wayne’s problem (one of fuckin’ many,) was Angie hadn’t been touching _him,_ not specifically; he could have been anyone to her. She hadn’t said his name or really even looked at him once in the bedroom. Not that he’d been any better, trying to block her out as much as possible while still giving her what she wanted. He can’t do that anymore, never wants to feel so used and bereft again. 

Katy snuggles into him, murmuring that they’ll talk in the morning, and Wayne fills up on her touch, lets himself drift off holding her and listening to her soft, sleepy breathing. 


	7. VII. WINTER IV.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I really wasn't fucking around with yez when I said this bullshit spiralled out of control. RL got kinda outta hand too, which didn't help. I'm glad to be finally fucking done with this, but now all I can see are the flaws and seams and the Frankenstein stitching holding everything together. 
> 
> This _will_ be rewritten. Think of it as my first draft. I am a better writer now than when I started. There were a lot of things I wanted to include in this story but I couldn't figure out how at the time. Hindsight being 20/20, I now know _exactly_ how I want to tackle those things.
> 
> This won't be updated. What I plan to do is rewrite, upload with a new title, and kick this one out of the series sequence to replace it with the new version. I will keep this one around, though, as a reminder. And also I love all the comments I've gotten on it so far, and I don't want to lose those. So this version will be... _heh..._ archived, and it will be connected to the series, but it won't remain in sequence once it's replaced.

Wayne and Angie start only seeing each other about once a week, give or take. It leaves him more time to focus on his work, to get his mind right about the future and what he wants. 

On the days, or nights, as the case may be, he does see her, he avoids having sex with her, begging off with any excuse. He’s tired, he’s not in the mood, he’s had too much to drink, his head hurts. If he can possibly stand it, he’ll service her even if she doesn’t ask for it, but he doesn’t enjoy it anymore. He gives up altogether after she rides his face one night and it doesn’t cause even the faintest stir of interest in him. The pang of loss blindsides him, and he aches for the memories of smothering himself between her thighs and being blissfully happy. 

Angie confronts him the third time he tries to redirect the evening away from the bedroom. The idea of telling her _everything_ crosses his mind at lightspeed, gone as soon as it arrived. That would be a short trip to bachelorhood. When this happened before, he’d chalked it up to the stress of all the upheaval in his life, which is really no different from now. He makes the argument that his _"condition"_ is temporary, but probably it isn’t helped by any expectations of him. Truth is, his total lack of desire is even worse now than it was right after his parents died, and he can’t even think about being touched by her without his skin trying to crawl off his bones. He hasn’t even gotten morning wood since the new year. 

Their dates take on a predictable structure once sex is tacitly acknowledged to be off the table. Without the added pressure, he finds he actually still enjoys doing things with her, whether they go out or just sit around and read. She’s still the same whip-smart, funny girl he knew in high school, the one who’d sit next to him when Katy or Darry weren’t around to divert unwanted Attention away from him. The one who could do a devastatingly accurate impression of every teacher who didn’t like him. They had been friends first, thrown together in a class in grade nine and left to their own devices. It was only in the last semester of grade twelve that he finally saw the way she looked at him and understood what _wanting_ someone meant. Back then, Angie wanted all of him; not just the nice, pretty bits, but the awkwardness and the stubbornness and the way he was uncompromisingly himself. For his part, having more than a shallow attraction aimed at him was uncharted territory. 

Wayne knew why girls, and a few lads, looked at him, ‘cos Katy explained it to him one day when they were fifteen. But that was usually where things began and ended. Once anyone spent any time around him, it became apparent that he was too rigid, too aloof, too uncomfortable and weird to be any fun. And while he could appreciate the human form aesthetically, sure, and he and Angie often agreed on the objects of that appreciation, that was where he ran out of road, too. Mere physicality didn’t really do anything for him, he _needed_ some deeper connection, some bond, before he could be truly attracted to someone. The number of people he actually gave a care about he could count on his fingers and toes, and he wouldn’t even have to take his boots off. She was the first person he could really see himself being with. What if he never found that again?

The things he kept in a drawer at her place slowly migrate back to the farm and he doesn’t bother to replace them. All of Angie’s stuff left at the farmhouse congregates in a pile by the front door, which must have been Darry’s doing, because only visitors use the front door and everybody else goes ‘round the back. Wayne stares at the neat stack of books, lip gloss, sunshades and a cardigan. The little pyramid is a monument to the unlacing of their lives, like two hands with fingers entwined pulling apart. These things had been in different rooms, a field of Angie dispersed throughout the house. Now they’re concentrated together, a discrete unit with finite boundaries. An intrusion versus a settlement. Looking at it makes him faintly queasy, like evidence of a thing he doesn’t want to admit, so he trains himself to not see it, to let his eyes slide right over it like it’s not there. 

The first anniversary of The Crash comes and goes and he, Katy, and Darry all retreat back into each other for about a week, give or take. When they come out of their bubble they're simultaneously stronger and yet a little more fragile than they were before. It’s a milestone they never wanted and hadn’t prepared for, a vicious gut-blow of grief renewed, and they weather it by holding fast to one another. 

Shortly thereafter, they’re on a night out for the whole crew. The bar is fairly busy, the usual crowd of people shooting pool and playing Buck Hunter, knocking back beers and bar snacks. Wayne’s patience is tested when a group of degens from upcountry starts getting too rowdy. They hassle the waitresses, pick fights, and generally spoil the night for everyone else.

Mrs. McMurray is playing darts with her friends from her "book club" (meaning, they all read the same trashy romance novels,) and they all bounce fetchingly up and down whenever one of them manages to hit the board. Wayne is prepared to admit it’s bounce-worthy considering how many gin and tonics the ladies have managed to pack away, quite a feat in and of itself. 

Apparently the degens appreciate this display as well, ‘cos they start crowding around Mrs. McMurray and her friends and pushing up on them, despite the ladies’ protests. Wayne grumbles and glares from his seat at the bar. He fuckin’ hates degens from upcountry so fuckin’ much. 

Angie serves him a Look and mouths the word _NO_. It’s not their problem. He almost gets up anyway when Mrs. McMurray yells at the guy next to her who's standing too close. Katy socks Wayne's arm and tells him to go sort them out, and Darry backs her up with a _pitter patter._ Angie is protesting this contradiction when the guy grabs Mrs. McMurray and puts his hand in her shirt, tearing the buttons off and causing her to shriek. 

Wayne’s off his stool in a flash and he smacks the degen across the back of the head. The other guys standing around all turn to face them, cracking knuckles and getting ready for a showdown. Wayne’s never seen this particular bunch before, but they sure seem to know who he is. It’s not really a surprise; he has a lot of good big reputation in Letterkenny and the surrounding area. 

The man lets go of Mrs. McMurray and asks Wayne if he’s got a problem. Wayne sure as fuck _does_ have a problem with assholes groping girls who don’t want to be groped, and especially if that girl is the wife of a buddy of his. When questioned on whether or not they’re going to fight this out, Wayne responds with a question of his own, i.e. _why should I fight ya like a man when I could smack ya like a bitch again?_ He gets up in the degen’s face, butting foreheads like rams as he roars for them to get out, _leave, **get the fuck out of his bar,**_ forcing him to walk backwards toward the door. There’s a heavy pause and then half the men and not a few women in the bar stand up to back Wayne. The sound of beers being set down and chairs scraping is deafening. The degens take this all in and the main offender puts his hands up and takes a step back. Alright, already, they’re going. They’re gone. 

They file out one by one, and when the door swings shut behind the last of them Wayne goes to stand in front of Mrs. McMurray, head down and huddling all by herself, holding her blouse closed in a white-knuckled grip. In the extended hush he pitches his voice soft and gentle and asks her if she’s okay. She shakes her head minutely and Wayne follows up by asking if she wants him to take her home. She nods and mumbles _yes, please_ in a voice as small as he’s ever heard. His arm shoots out and some bright spark puts Mrs. McMurray’s jacket in his hand. He settles it around her shoulders and escorts her out the back to his truck. 

As he passes the bar, he grits his teeth and says to Angie they’ll talk about this later. She’s cross with him, but right now he’s angry with her too, and he honestly doesn’t give a care. Angie asks how she’s supposed to get home and he tells her to _figure it out._ Dan speaks up and says he’ll give her a ride, so Wayne sends him a thankful nod. Katy’s expression lets him know they’ll also be having Words when he gets home. He deserves it. He’s pissed as hell things got that out of hand. He should never have allowed it to go that far and he owes Mrs. McMurray an apology. 

Wayne pulls all the way up the laneway to the McMurray’s house and cuts the engine. She’d stared at her boots, silent the whole drive, and she doesn’t move or look up even now. Wayne turns to her and says he’s sorry for not stepping in sooner. He’d seen what was happening, where it was headed, and he should have stopped it. 

Mrs. McMurray raises her face to him then and he sees the tear tracks on her cheeks, shining in the porch light. She says he saved her, she doesn’t blame _him,_ it was those _fuckin’ degens..._ and she chokes on what she was going to say next and plants her face on his shoulder, sobbing. _Oh, bother._ Wayne awkwardly tries to comfort her by putting his arm around her and patting her shoulder while also touching her as little as possible. He looks out the windscreen, thinking that he actually quite likes the McMurrays, in his own way [*]. It’s just that they’re so fucking Weird he doesn’t quite know how to handle them sometimes.

He lets her cry herself out, not saying anything. She only carries on for a couple minutes before pulling herself together and apologising for blubbering on him. _That_ makes him feel worse than anything, that she felt she had to apologise to him for being upset. 

Wayne squirms in his seat for a moment, staring at the steering wheel, before asking her if she wants to call McMurray himself and ask him to come home from work early.

She _hmm_ ’s and _haa_ ’s for a while, indecisive. It’s not like it’s an _emergency_ , or anything. She’s home safe. She should be fine.

Wayne asks if she wants him to wait until she gets into the house to leave. 

At that suggestion, she freezes. She doesn’t want to be alone right now, not even in her own house. He doesn’t really blame her. If this isn’t an actual _emergency,_ then it is first cousin to one.

Mrs. McMurray invites him in to wait with her. His mouth puckers in distaste and he grumbles a bit, turning to his window. He’d better not. He’s in the doghouse enough already. Angie’s cross with him for almost fighting after he promised not to and Katy’s cross with him for taking too long to man up and sort the mess out. He’s gonna get a earful on both sides after this. 

She says his name in a careful sort of way, so he looks back over at her and she touches his hand with just the very tips of her fingers. She’s known him a long time, and she knows it’s been hard for him this last year, and she likes to think they’re friends of a sort. It’s gotten around town that Angie banned him from fighting. She’s not trying to say anything against Angie, but… is he _sure_ that’s the best thing for him? ‘Cos it looks like it’s eating him up. 

Unaccustomed to this level of insight from a woman who just last week tossed back a bakers’ dozen g&t’s and danced on a table down at Gail’s, Wayne shuffles his feet and shifts in his seat. Mrs. McMurray withdraws her hand immediately and faces forward. Awkward silence reigns for almost half a minute before she asks him to wait just a sec, she’ll be right back. 

She runs inside and flicks on all the lights, and comes back lickety-split with a 6 pack of Puppers in her hand. They crack open a couple and toast each other, sipping quietly, watching the house blazing like a ship out at sea in the night. Mrs. McMurray manages to keep the silence for longer than Wayne’d credited her for, waiting until there’s half the bottle left before speaking. She tells him a story about how, when she first started going out with McMurray he’d gotten into a fight at the go-karts after some dink had made several rather personal comments about her. In exchange, he tells her about the time in high school Darry put four hockey players in hospital and busted his lip fighting for Wayne’s honour. 

They’ve both gotten pretty relaxed after the beers and trading stories. He feels… comfortable, maybe. At ease. Now that Mrs. McMurray’s had the chance to put some distance between her and what happened at the bar, she seems better, too. He asks again if she wants to call her husband. McMurray should be here, he should know what’s going on. After a moment, she agrees and gets her phone out. 

They polish off the remaining Pupperses and stuff the bottles back into the cardboard carrier while they wait for him to show. Wayne’s leaning up against the tailgate and having a dart when McMurray pulls up. Mrs. McMurray jumps out and flings herself at her husband, and Wayne watches them from a distance and finishes his smoke. She brings McMurray up to speed on the goings-on down at Modean’s and he turns impressively puce as she lays it all out for him. McMurray snorts and stamps his way through her recounting like a bull what’s had his tail pulled. When she’s done, pointing and waving at Wayne, he wraps her up so tight in a hug all the breath is squeezed out of her in one go and she melts against him, looking just so happy. Something inside Wayne’s chest twinges and pulls at the expression on Mrs. McMurray’s face and he tries to remember the last time someone looked like that for him. Probably it was Katy. 

The McMurrays come over and he grabs Wayne’s hand up and is shaking it for all he’s worth, gushing about what a good guy Wayne is and how grateful he is that Wayne was looking out for his Missus, on and on. Wayne’s still not settled in himself about how he waited to step in, but that’s a conversation he needs to have with Angie and Katy[*]. Wayne finally manages to extract his hand from McMurray’s just in time for Mrs. McMurray to hug him almost as tight as her husband had hugged her earlier. She holds onto him like he’s the only thing keeping her up, and maybe for a while tonight he’d been that. His arms flail like a robot’s as he figures out where’s a safe place for them to go before settling his hands on her shoulders. 

Wayne’s undone a bit as Mrs. McMurray rocks up on her tip-toes, kisses his cheek, and thanks him for helping her. Her gratitude is real and sincere, but he can’t let go of all the ways in which he’d failed. He hugs her back as best he can before his skin starts trying to crawl away. She’s pretty good at reading him though, and the instant his arms loosen around her she steps back and lets him go. It’s the least awkward thing he’s done with either of the McMurrays in a long time. McMurray goes to shake Wayne’s hand again but this time Wayne’s on the lookout and he out-manoeuvers McMurray, grabbing _his_ hand instead. McMurray looks painfully earnest as he tries to thank Wayne again, but Wayne cuts him off before he starts, saying he, Wayne, knows that McMurray would do the same for him if it had been Katy. Or Angie. And now he, McMurray, should go take care of his wife. 

McMurray nods and says he will, but just as Wayne starts to pull his hands back, McMurray holds on and gives him one last, soul-deep _thank you._ It would be churlish of Wayne not to acknowledge it, so he returns a nod and climbs into his truck as soon as he physically can. It’s not too late, so he texts Angie that he’s on his way over. 

They’ve had disagreements before, they’ve had fights, but this is the first time he’s ever raised his voice to her in anger. Standing by while someone gets hurt is not the sort of man he is, it never has been, and she used to know that. He _refuses_ to become that man. If Angie can’t understand or accept that anymore, then she’s not the person he fell for five years ago. If she loves him, she won’t try to twist him into something he’s not. 

All the wind gets sucked out of his sails when she agrees with him. If she hadn’t interfered, maybe it wouldn’t have gotten so out-of-hand. 

It’s disorienting to hear her articulate his own thoughts at him. Suddenly on the back foot, he goes through several false starts before asking what changed her mind. 

Squirrely Dan is a very persuasives talker, apparently. In the couple minutes it took to drive her home from the bar, he’d made several salient points, including that since McMurray was not there, and Mrs. McMurray had no way of defending herself, it was Wayne’s responsibility to help her out if he could. In the absence of McMurray himself, Wayne, as the Toughest Guy in Letterkenny, was the most equipped and entitled (literally) to deal with the degens. Everyone looked to him for that sort of thing, and they had done from the time he’d started shaving, practically. They used to look to his Dad and Uncle Eddie, and Wayne was their heir apparent; now that his parents are gone and Ed’s in Florida, he has a duty. 

That is _way_ more ground than he ever thought she’d concede. He’d come prepared for a furious, blazing row. What he got was barely ruffled feathers. Faced with such an enormous lack of resistance, he was still somehow at a disadvantage. Off-piste and off-kilter, he asks her what comes next.

She still doesn’t want him to fight. All her concerns about him hurting himself are still real. The lesson she learnt from tonight’s events was to let Wayne have his head _before_ things got bad, to prevent them from escalating. She can’t say how she’d react in a real life-or-death situation, but she trusts him to make that judgement. 

Wayne apologises, he feels like an ass for yelling at her the way he did. He should have come correct and spoken to her like an adult, like he’s always done, like he’d learnt from Dad. Just to be clear, though: no more fighting, unless it’s absolutely necessary? Is that what he’s hearing?

Angie would prefer no more fighting at all, ever. What she wants is for Wayne to solve problems _before_ they come to blows. 

That all seems... reasonable? After all that, he needs to mull it over. 

He drives home in a fog. Katy’s waiting for him in the kitchen and asks where the fuck he’s been. She’s worked up a good head of steam and if she doesn’t vent it, she’ll blow her stack. Wayne ponderously empties his pockets and shucks his coat, hanging it on the peg. He tells Katy what he and Angie talked about, but he says it like it’s a question. 

Katy asks him to explain again how exactly the tables had turned from him being in the right to her. 

He’s not entirely sure how he went from being justifiably angry to being the one to say sorry. Everything had made sense over at Angie’s, and now it’s all muddled up in his head. 

Katy squints at him, her lips pressed together in a frown. She must make some kind of decision, ‘cos her expression changes and on the turn of a dime she’s a predator and he’s the prey. She slinks across the kitchen, past the table, and presses him down into a chair with just the tips of her fingers in the centre of his chest. He takes a sharp breath as she kicks his feet apart to stand between them, looming over him, and her fingers trail north and raise his chin, tipping his face up so he can’t look anywhere but at her. If he was Gus or Stormy, he’d have his ears laid flat back and his tail tucked between his legs. He’s in for it now. 

Her face is stony still as she tells him she’s disappointed with his behaviour this evening. What would Dad and Uncle Eddie think about how he’d acted? What would Ma say? 

Wayne swallows and says he knows he fucked up. He’d ignored everything he’d ever been taught about being a good man just to keep peace with Angie. He was wrong to take the easy way instead of doing what was right, and he’s full sorry for it. 

Well, that was a mighty pretty apology. Was Angie’s apology that nice? Katy’s fingernails just barely bite into the soft skin under his chin as he swallows again. What about Mrs. McMurray? He did apologise to her, right? Since she was the one who got hurt?

Wayne tries to think as Katy holds him still. Of course he’d apologised to Mrs. McMurray. She’d told him there was nothing to forgive and they’d had beers as friends while waiting for McMurray to get home. His apology to Angie had been… Wait. _His_ apology. To _Angie_. 

Angie hadn’t apologised. At all. 

The realisation steals his breath away. She _was_ in the wrong. Mrs. McMurray had gotten hurt because Angie was wrong and had convinced Wayne to go along with it, which in turn had caused himself no small amount of hurt. And she hadn’t apologised for it, not to him nor to Mrs. McMurray. To be fair, he’d hustled them out to his truck p.d.q. in the interest of getting her home, but he’d stopped at the bar to check in before he left. She’d had the opportunity. But she hadn’t even said she felt bad about it, _fuck._

He doesn’t twig to the fact that he’s talking out loud until the last stunned cuss leaves his mouth. Katy changes again from chilly marble to warm understanding. Wayne reaches for her, hooking a finger in her belt loops and pulling, and she obliges him by sitting down and letting him hold her while it all sinks in. Angie isn’t going to apologise, because she thinks she’s right. She _doesn’t_ feel bad. 

Wayne doesn’t know what to do with this. 

Katy saves him from spiralling down into that particular rabbit hole by bringing his attention back to her. She accepts his apology and bestows the blessing of her benediction on him, putting a second lipstick mark right over Mrs. McMurray’s, and rests her forehead against his, noses aligned and breathing together. 

Wayne grounds himself counting off shared breaths, tries to just exist in the moment instead of getting lost in a hundred thousand possibilities, each and every one of them awful. He concentrates on the feeling of Katy’s ribs rising and falling under his hands, the tiny pauses between. The rhythm of it calms him, slowing down his mind and heart. Katy grows heavier in his arms and his eyelids start dropping. _Bedtime, kiddo._

She makes a small noise of assent and sits up, stretching. She’s definitely ready to go to sleep. He asks if she wants some company, and she replies that she’s got some things to think about, so, not right now. They say their goodnights, but before Katy stands up, she makes Wayne promise there will never be a repeat of tonight’s behaviour. He swears there won’t be and then she deadarms him, which, _ow,_ what the _fuck,_ and says there’d better not be as she walks out the kitchen. He hollers after her that she’s sending him some really mixed signals. 

Wayne gets the shouting match he expected two weeks later, after the annual St. Patrick’s Day Party at the Agricultural Hall. Angie didn’t attend the festivities on account of her folks being Prods of the extremely staid Dutch Calvinist type. They don’t approve of St. Patrick’s Day, or Wayne for that matter: his Irishness, his _extremely_ lapsed Catholicism [*] or his predilection for scrappin’. Being with Wayne is by way of bein' a sort of Rebellion for Angie against her parents’ strict way of life. 

The story of Legend Darry gets back to her the next day and she comes over to the farm, where they have Words. Katy, Darry, and Squirrely Dan evacuate to the Produce stand for the duration of the screaming row, after which Wayne is pissier than the car park behind Modean’s. 

How was beating the shit out of one group of degens any different than another? They’d been doing the same type of shit they always do. 

Angie insists the difference is that last time Wayne didn’t instigate a donnybrook ‘cos his _puir Paddy feelings_ were bent outta shape; he’d smacked, not fought, one dude, specifically for hurting his buddy’s wife. 

Wayne clenches his fists and chooses to ignore the _Paddy_ dig. He yells back, so, what? He’s just supposed to ignore it when they’re grabbing on girls he doesn’t personally know?

Of course not, but Angie wants him to figure out another way to solve the problem _before_ all hands start throwing hands. He needs to start using his head for something other than nuttin’ folk. He’s more than smart and capable enough to do it, he just doesn’t _want_ to. If he can’t do this for her even though he said he would, why should she stay with him? She can’t keep watching him hurt himself. 

He protests that he didn’t get hurt this time, not even a little bit.

Then she really starts giving out and screaming. That’s not the fucking _point!_ He’s fighting everything and everyone all the time just so he doesn’t have to deal with how he feels, because it’s the only thing he knows how to do. It’s a distraction, a way for him to escape from what’s going on, and by throwing himself into the fray he’s not just hurting his body, he’s killing _himself_ little by little. Why can’t he just _grow the fuck up already,_ be a man, and get his house in order? He needs to deal with his shit.

Wayne closes his eyes and counts slowly to twenty, trying to control his breathing, hands rotating in circles. He reminds himself that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about because he took steps to arrange it that way. If she did know, they’d split up fer sure. 

When he can speak at a normal volume he tells her to _please leave._

For a second, she just gapes at him, speechless. What the fuck did he just say to her?

He repeats, _please leave._ He can’t talk about this right now. 

That is unacceptable to Angie. He’s just running away again. The only way to get past this is to work it out now.

Wayne tells her he’s so angry he can’t see straight. He’s asking for a break so he can take some time to think about this, because he doesn’t want to say anything he’ll regret. 

Angie throws her hands up. Great. He needs time. That’s just great. He’s _had_ time. She’s given him so much time. 

He explodes, losing it, roaring at her. What the _fuck_ does she think he’s been doing? Standing around with his horn in his hand? He’s been trying to figure out how to keep living and breathing _every fucking day_ since his parents died, how to be strong enough to keep going for Katy and Darry. He’s had to make decisions this last year that he never thought he’d have to make, like whether or not Angie's _worth_ giving up part of himself. She should have asked him to cut off his arm instead, that would’ve been easier. She’s asking him for _so much_ and he isn’t sure he’s got anything left to give. So, yeah, he needs time, and she needs to get out of his house.

He stands panting in the ringing silence. Well, too late now for regrets. 

All the colour leaves Angie’s face, like mercury falling in a thermometer, and her mouth drops open. She starts, _what-,_

Wayne cuts her off there. They’ll talk later. Right now, he’s going upstairs. She knows where the door is. 

Wayne waits until he can hear the gravel in the laneway crunching as Angie backs her car out to come back down and get into the Gus’n’Bru. He carries the whole bottle out to the produce stand and doesn’t even bother with any shot glasses. He’s not exactly keen on sharing much of it with anyone. He crumples into his lawn chair and flicks the cork out of the bottle with his thumb, sending it flying. It’s unlikely it’ll be seen again, but sure as God’s got sandals, he’s not gonna need it. 

Everyone waits patiently for Wayne to neck the top sixth of the bottle before silently electing a spokesperson to ask how he’s doing. Of course it’s Katy, she’s the one he’s least likely to bite the head off of. 

He doesn’t want to talk about it, he’d much rather drink about it, so if they could all kindly keep their traps shut, please and thanks. 

Squirrely Dan wants to know if Wayne’s at least going to pass the bottle around. 

He wasn’t really planning on it, no. 

Katy puts the kibosh on that, barking his name and sticking out her hand. He’s brought this on himself, spoiling her s’goddamn bad, but he’s never been able to say no to Katy, especially when she puts her foot down. He forks it over. 

Katy takes a slug, passes it to Darry who does likewise, and passes it on to Dan, who takes his drink and then has the _temerity_ , the sheer brass _balls_ to check with Katy first, right in front of Wayne, before passing it back to him. He snatches the rye out of Dan’s hand with a scowl that could curdle milk and proceeds to pour another heavy dose right down his gullet. 

He’s cut off for awhile after that just for being a shit, but he’s already starting to feel the benefit, so he doesn’t give a care. The evening wears on as normal, except for the lack of conversation from Wayne. If he opens his mouth to do anything other than eat or drink he’s gonna pop off, and he’s already done that one too many times today. 

Come bedtime, he’s had enough of whiskey and anger to be thoroughly sick and tired of both. Katy walks him upstairs with his arm over her shoulders like the shitshow that he is and pours him into his bed. He pulls her in after him before she can get too far away and asks her to stay. He doesn’t want to stare at the ceiling all night on his own. 

She glances around the room, noting the pile of Angie’s things that was by the front door now seemed to be living on Wayne’s dresser. 

No, she won’t stay here tonight. But he can stay in her room if he wants. 

Her terms are acceptable, so they adjourn to the bathroom to brush teeth and hair and dress down for sleeping. They slide in to cool, crisp sheets and settle down, or try to anyway. Wayne keeps fidgeting and it’s driving Katy mad, so she pins him down and slithers on top of him to hold him still. Her weight on him is just heavy enough to make him have to concentrate on getting enough air as he breathes. On autopilot his hands rest on her waist, thumbs stroking back and forth across her ribs until they both drop off into sleep. 

Wayne and Angie don’t speak for the rest of the week. No phone calls, no dates, no Modean’s, no bumping into each other on the street or at the store, not even a text. Nothing. Until: 

[Angie] Can we talk?

[Wayne] We should talk. When and where?

[Angie] Ice cream stand in the park. Neutral ground.

[Angie] This afternoon. 15:00?

[Wayne] K.

Wayne shows up and she’s already waiting. They sit on opposite sides of the picnic table, Angie with her hands folded in front of her and Wayne with his arms crossed tight over his chest. 

Angie goes first. She’s the one whos asked to meet, after all. She must have something to say. 

She wants to know why Wayne kept the fact that he’s suicidal from her. 

Wayne’s immediate reaction is blank shock. He’s not _suicidal._ Who ever said he was _suicidal?_ He certainly didn’t say he was _suicidal._ Where’s this coming from? And maybe they don’t need to say the word _suicidal_ anymore.

She quotes him: _He’s been trying to figure out how to keep living and breathing_ every fucking day _since his parents died, how to be strong enough to keep going._ That’s _suicidal._ She looked it up. Actually, she’s looked up a lot of things the last couple of days, like, just to take an example _completely_ and _totally_ at random, _Depression,_ and _stress- induced impotence._

Wayne checks around quickly and then hisses at her that she should try saying it a little louder, maybe, ‘cos there’s people on the _fucking Moon_ who might not have heard. 

That earns him a sad shake of her head. It’s actually pretty common, and nothing to be ashamed of. They’ve got to talk about their problems if they want to fix them. Which brings the conversation very neatly back ‘round to her original query, i.e., _why didn’t he tell her?_

It takes a couple of tries to formulate his reasoning. He has to go carefully here; not _lying,_ obviously, but he doesn’t need to volunteer the information that he’s desperate not to marry her either. Maybe telling her part of the truth would be a good idea. Like 90% of the truth. It would contextualise some things for both of them. 

What he eventually settles on is: he’s tried to tell her he’s not ready for a big change in their relationship for the last year and she’s not listened to him. She’s kept pushing for what _she_ wants without taking his concerns seriously. And then she asked him to give up fighting, to stop being the Toughest Guy in Letterkenny, a feat that is so important to him it’s a major part of who he is as a person, and what’s more, she told him that if he didn’t choose to do it, she’d leave him. Katy called it _holding their relationship to ransom,_ and she was right. So why would he tell her about… how _fucked up_ in the head he’s been? 

Angie’s eyes well up and _aw, fuck,_ she’s gonna cry right here in the park in front of God and everybody. He’d hoped to avoid this exact thing by agreeing to meet out in public, but now anybody who looks at them is going to assume the worst. Wayne glares down at his boots while one leg bounces like a Californian seismograph. Fuck _every_ duck.

So this is all her fault, then?

No, of course not. He never said any of it was her _fault._ But her actions had affected him. It would be weird if, as a couple, they didn’t. She just has certain… expectations of him, and he’s said before that those expectations weren’t doing him any favours. 

They were _really_ doing this, they were opening the Pandora’s box of their relationship and their capital-P _Problems,_ in the bloody _public park_ for anyone passing by to hear. Wayne could just feel his soul leaving his body. Anywhere but here. Maybe some kind-hearted stranger would see his face and shoot him to put him out of his misery. 

The rest of the conversation went about as _puirly_ as anyone could imagine, what with Angie trying for open and transparent communication and Wayne scrabbling to preserve discretion and privacy. They were at cross-purposes from jump, which made for a frustrating and unproductive discussion. 

Angie wanted to try seeing someone, both together and singly. They need help, Wayne needs help, and not talking about it and not doing anything about it hasn’t worked. It’s only made them both miserable. 

Hard. To the fuckin’. _No._ You don’t air your dirty laundry. 

Therapy isn’t airing anyone’s dirty laundry. It’s getting help to solve a problem they can’t fix themselves. 

That doesn’t change the fact that you’re telling a stranger all your problems. He can barely talk to Angie herself about this shit, and he lo… Wayne breaks off and looks around again like ninjas might pop out of a bush and attack them. Satisfied, he leans in and lowers his voice. He loves and trusts _her,_ and it’s still harder than pulling teeth. He’s not good at it and it _hurts_ , more than anything’s ever hurt in his life. No _way_ is he going to go into some boring office and basically strip himself naked to be gawked at. Forget it. 

Well, what they’ve been doing hasn’t worked. They need to try something else.

Right, exactly. They haven’t tried talking it out between the two of them, so why not give that a go first. 

Because she’s been begging him to do that for a year and nothing’s happened. She’s always the one to push and pull and prod him into opening up and telling her _anything,_ and it’s always a fight. She feels like Wayne would never talk about his feelings again if he could possibly get away with it. Why should any of that change now? What’s different now? Nothing.

‘Round and ‘round in circles they go, unable to come to some sort of compromise. Around the hour two mark, Wayne’s about to take a fucking migraine. He’s had as much of this as he can stomach, and he needs to go home and help Katy make dinner. Taking a break to let this stuff sink in and picking it back up later might be the best thing they can do. He can only handle so much. 

Angie very reluctantly agrees. They both have a lot to consider. 

At home Katy tells him she’s going out on a date after dinner, and she’ll be home around midnight. 

Darry pipes up, asking who she’s going out with. 

She names a couple of the local hockey players for the Shamrocks and Wayne squints and grumbles. Fuckin’ hockey players would grab a monkey by the tit if they could. That’s no kinda way to treat a girl. 

When Katy comes back, he can hear the shower going through the wall his room shares with the bathroom. She checks on him after, still damp and smelling of conditioner and the same lotion their Ma used, so he pulls her into bed with him and asks her to please stay. He hasn’t gotten the chance yet to tell her about what happened in the park. He needs her perspective. 

She’s tired, and they have to get up early, so can they talk in the morning?

 _Anything,_ he says. Anything she wants, as long as she stays. 

That’s good enough for Katy, so she wiggles around, lays her head on his arm crooked up by the pillow, and pulls his other arm across to hold her. Wayne scoops her in tight and pecks the freckles behind her ear, settling down for the night with his nose in her hair and his hand on her tummy. Who needs a teddy bear when he’s got a Katy. 

Wayne goes over the highlights for Katy the next day as she works in the dairy, checking her logbook and rotating cheeses, filling orders for fresh butter and cream and yoghurt. She has him lifting and emptying milk canisters for her, ‘cos if he’s gonna be taking up real estate in the cramped cold room, he may as well make himself useful. 

Katy goes stiff and pale as Wayne repeats for her verbatim what Angie said about being suicidal. He’s _scared_ her, telling her this, _or maybe she was scared already and this is the last straw,_ he thinks, watching the way her eyes widen and her face crumples. He can’t do anything but hold her as she flings her arms around his neck and tries to practically climb him amongst the racks of cheeses. He balances her on his hip like a little kid as she tells him, crying into his ear, that he’s not allowed to leave her, and if anything happens she’ll find him in Hell and kick his ass. 

It’s not anything like that, Wayne reassures her. He’s not about to go and do something stupid. He’s just having a hard time remembering how living can be good. Katy’s not heavy, but her grip on him is awkward, so he shifts her weight onto his forearms under her bum so her knees stop making his ribs creak and she’s no longer strangling him quite so much. 

She asks if there’s anything she can do, some way she can help, and he melts a little inside and tells her she’s already doing it. She pets his face a little bit, stroking his cheek and tipping up his chin so he looks at her face. Their foreheads touch and she whispers that she loves him, she needs him, he’s got to stick around for her. He’s not allowed to go before she does. 

Well, she’s not allowed to go before him, so there. 

Guess they’ll never die then. They’ll just have to spend the rest of their immortal life annoying each other.

That makes him smile, like actually smile, not the grimacing approximation he deploys when smiling is expected of him. Katy matches it with her own and presses their mouths together just for a moment, and he tries to memorise the feeling of his smile against hers. They were cut from the same cloth, strands of each other woven into the very fabric of their being. She is his home, just as much as the farm itself. 

Wayne leans up against the marble counter, Katy wound tight around him like a baby koala, and they spend a while just being quiet together. They do, however, actually need to get some fuckin’ work done today, so he sets her down with a squeeze and they finish up weighing the milk and making new curds. Wayne always thinks best with his hands busy, working on autopilot and muscle memory. 

Whenever Katy says she loves him, there’s never any awkward pause or expectation that he’ll use those same words. She never pushes to hear it because she lets him tell her in a hundred thousand different ways, like planting her favourite flowers around the vegetable patch, drying dishes together, bringing her tea in the evenings and coffee in bed every Sunday morning. Everything he does, he uses it to show the words he’s said out loud to her less than a handful of times in their entire life. Katy speaks fluent Wayne, so she understands. 

With Angie he’s like a language she hasn’t spoken in a while, mostly forgotten. There’s a few phrases she can still remember, but making herself understood is laborious, and understanding even more so. They have to find some kinda _lingua franca_ if they’re gonna make things work. Maybe that means going through a translator, taking a couple language classes. So to speak.

Wayne runs all this by Katy while they’re washing, crating, and stacking the morning’s eggs for delivery. He needs to be sure he’s not just talking outta his ass, here. 

There is… merit to the idea, she admits. None of them really have the tools they need to deal with any of this. Katy’s on pretty shaky ground herself right now. A sympathetic ear would not go amiss. If that s. e. had training and wisdom to impart, so much the better. 

The vague hope that Katy might volunteer to be his translator dies a lingering death. So he outright asks her instead. 

Absolutely not. It’s completely inappropriate. She’s too biased towards him, it would be like ganging up on Angie. She’s not going to put herself between him and _his girlfriend._ Technically, she could be considered _the other woman_ in this scenario, despite the fact that, even more technically, she _super_ isn’t. And all of that doesn’t begin to touch on the fact that Katy herself could use her own s. e., not only because of what she’s just learnt from Wayne, but for the whole last year and change. She’s simply not in a place where she could do what he asked, even if she would, which she won’t. 

Wayne can’t argue with that. A hypocrite is not the type of prick he is. They do all the chorin’ that day side-by-side, both of them feeling a bit clingy. That night he texts Angie to arrange a meet-up and discuss finding someone to talk to. He and Katy don’t even pretend to go to bed separately, they just get ready without speaking and go to her room. 

_Seeing someone_ doesn’t go well. Wayne has no patience for any kinda crunchy granola, psycho-mumbo-jumbo nonsense, or aligning his fuckin’ chakras or what the fuck ever. Bone rattlers and bead shakers, the lot of ‘em. They see three different counsellors before giving it up as a bad job. 

Détente is reached finally after agreeing that therapy isn’t for them. By that time, their fifth anniversary is right around the corner. In an effort to be Romantic, they decide on a quiet night in, just the two of them spending time together to reconnect. 

Wayne has the brilliant idea of getting Angie a Serious Adult gift. Something that would show her, convince her, that he’s committed to making it work between them. Jewellry is the thing, a diamond. He’s got a bit saved up, and if need be his credit’s good in town. 

He looks around online, tries to figure out the difference between quality and gimcrack. He’s got no eye for this kind of thing, so he does what he always does and asks Katy for help. 

First thing she asks is if he’s _lost his fucking mind._ A diamond isn’t just a serious gift, it’s a promise. It’s the exact thing he’s been trying to avoid. 

Wayne’s not buying her a _ring,_ he thought maybe a bracelet or something. A necklace. He shows Katy a picture of a heart pendant he liked the look of. It’s a hideous thing, barely more than a chunk of glass strung on a chain that looks more like it came from a hardware store than a silversmith. She throws up her hands, saying if he’s going to persist in this folly, she’s damn well not going to let him shame himself or her by buying something that fuck-ugly. 

After an intense lecture on clarity, colour, cut and carat, she makes him drive out to the city and they look in an actual diamond exchange. He fixates on the first thing he sees, a necklace with a one-centimetre stone on a chain drilled right through the diamond itself, but gets brow-beaten by Katy into scaling back. It’s not an appropriate cut or setting either. Once he sees the $30,000 pricetag, the idea loses its appeal. He’d been thinking more along the lines of five or six grand, which was almost everything he had in the bank that didn’t technically belong to the farm. They spend all day looking at loose stones and settings until Wayne feels like his eyes are spinning in his head. He begs Katy to _please_ pick something, anything, so he can pay and they can go home. 

The old man behind the counter tuts at him for speaking to such a beautiful young lady in such a manner. If Wayne doesn’t shape up, she might leave him for someone with a sweeter disposition. 

While Wayne’s brain attempts to reboot and recover, Katy explains she’s stuck with him, that brothers are not so easily dumped. She’s helping him pick a gift for his actual girlfriend. 

After that, she is the apple of the old man’s eye. What a sweet girl she is, so smart, so giving, so unappreciated. Would she like to meet his son, a good-looking young man, who has a promising career here at the family business?

Katy laughs it off, but politely, and regretfully informs her new friend that she’s walking out with someone from back home. Wayne opens his mouth and she steps on his foot before he can say anything about hockey players, plural. 

She eventually picks a beautiful round solitaire on a chain so fine it looks like a baby’s hair. It’s very elegant and grown-up, and the salesman praises her excellent taste. A Valourous woman, who can find? Her value is far beyond that of rubies and pearls. Wayne almost has a heart attack when they ask him to sign the receipt, but this was his idea, and he’s going to see it through come Hell or high water. 

At home, he sits on his bed and opens the black velvet box to look at it again. His hands are shaking and his heart is pounding. Why is he so nervous? She’s not even _here._ The sight of just the box makes him feel a bit greasy around the edges so he hides it in a pair of socks in a drawer until the day arrives. 

Wayne goes through his pre-date checklist: truck washed, hair cut, showered and shaved, wearing the cleanest jeans and most smartly-pressed shirt he owns. He pulls out the jewellry box and sucks in a few heaving breaths before shoving it in his pocket. He presents himself for inspection downstairs to general approval. Darry says he looks finer’n frog hair and Katy agrees that he cleans up nice. Dan says he’s proud of Wayne, and he wishes him good luck with a firm handshake, slipping a little folded packet into Wayne’s hand. Darry claps him on the back as he and Dan leave for Modean’s, and Katy gives him a quick hug and kiss before she heads upstairs to get ready for her own night out. 

In the truck, Wayne inspects the piece of paper that Dan slid into his palm. Unfolding it reveals a little blue diamond shaped pill. _How in the actual fuck-_

But Squirrely Dan moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. Wayne’s equal parts touched that Dan’s looking out for him and slightly unnerved by whatever arcane knowledge his friend possesses that allows him to look into men’s souls. He folds the pill back up into the piece of paper and slips it into the watch pocket of his denims. 

On the way over to Angie’s he stops and buys a card, some chocolates, and flowers. The checkout girl whom he vaguely remembers from school simpers at him about how lucky Angie is to have such a wonderful and attentive lover. Wayne’s stomach turns over and he hightails it out of there before he spits right there on the counter. He blanks out in the truck when he tries to think up something to write in the card, and he can’t find a pen anyway, so he doesn’t write anything and feels dumber than a fence post. 

He stands in front of Angie’s door, flowers and candy and card in hand _like a fool,_ a walking cliché, and why in the fuck can’t he just be a normal person for five goddamn minutes together? He’s a lost little boy playing at being a man, so far in over his head that he’s drowning. He wants Katy here. But she’s off getting good on her own, and he wouldn’t stop her from being happy if it meant his life. A few more deep breaths and he lets himself in. 

At first, he doesn’t understand what he’s seeing. Did he accidentally walk in the wrong door? But then her voice registers, and the repetetive slapping sound of skin on skin. There’s a slightly chubby dude standing naked in front of the couch, railing Angie from behind as she moans. 

Wayne throws the bundle of things in his hands onto the table and immediately flips one of the kitchen chairs, breaking it, and he demands to know _what the fuck is this._ Chaos ensues. 

Angie lets out a shocked gasp and tries to cover herself with the throw blanket on the back of the couch, and Chubby stands there with his less-than-impressive cock out, wanting to know who Wayne is. Wayne hollers back that he’s her boyfriend, that’s who the fuck he is. And who’s this assclown with too much product in his hair and a fucking nipple ring? 

Pleading, Angie tries to get Wayne to calm down, they can talk about this, will Chubby _please put on some fucking pants._ Wayne doesn’t particularly think there’s anything to talk about, it’s pretty clear that Angie’s a _fucking cheater_ , end of. There’s nowhere really to go after that. 

If Wayne would please just let her explain- 

Explain what? That she’d been lying to him? That she’d led him on while fucking someone else behind his back? What the fuck was all the fighting for? What was the point of going to all those idiotic counselling sessions if she was doing this? How long has this been going on? Is this the first time?

It’s been going on since he got in that terrible fight at the beginning of the year. And it’s not the first time. She’d been seeing someone in Montréal, even before their little ‘break’.

It takes a second for that to sink in all the way. To be clear: this started _long before_ the fighting was an issue. And it _continued_ after he agreed to give it up like she wanted. 

It’s true. 

Wayne can’t fucking believe it. Of all the bullshit she’s put him through. For years, every time she gave out about something _he’d done_ and took the high road, made _him_ feel like the bad guy, pushed him into doing things against his better judgement, she was doing _this._ Fucking some porky citiot with a dick smaller than Gus’s. 

Well, it’s not like she’d been getting any from him.

Red creeps into the edges of his vision and he hears ringing and the pounding of blood in his ears. Any second now the top of his head’s gonna split open and some real freaky Cú Chulainn-type shit’s gonna go down. Wayne has never once in his life _ever_ wanted to raise his hand to a girl, but right now he could murder the both of them, cheerfully, and without remorse. He stands there struggling to breathe, fists circling and clenching so hard he can feel his nails cutting into his palms. 

So that’s what it all comes down to. That’s what she’s been missing. Not any of the emotional connection they’d once had, nothing tender or sweet, not being cherished and loved, or supported. Just: cock. Simple. Base. Animal. 

Citiot, _still without any goddamn pants on,_ starts chirping about Wayne standing there doing nothing. Without thinking, Wayne scoops up one of the busted chair legs and swings it in a huge overhand arc straight for the other man’s head. Angie shrieks Wayne’s name like she’s being murdered, and only pure instinct stops him in his tracks like a clockwork soldier. 

The impromptu billy club freezes to a halt two centimetres from Citiot’s face. The _stupit bastard_ only then realises how close he came to the Gates of Hell, and all the colour drains out of his face as he stumbles back and falls over the arm of the couch. 

Slow as a glacier, Wayne lowers his arm. He’s got to leave, got to go home before he goes to jail for double homicide. He slams the chair leg down on the table, and says _Happy Fuckin’ Anniversary_ to Angie as he storms out. 

He doesn’t even remember the drive home, just blinks and he’s there, pulling in behind Katy’s little pickup truck. Floating in a haze, Wayne goes inside and upstairs, reaching the landing just as Katy’s closing her bedroom door, all done up for her date. 

She gives him a curious look, asks what happened that he’s back so early. 

The simple fact _Angie’s cheating on him_ does not begin to convey the enormity of the situation, but it’s all he can get out before he completely loses the plot. 

_She fucking what?_ Katy’s face looks like Wayne feels, shocked and numb and stabbed through the heart. Like his mind hasn’t quite caught up to the physical pain of what’s happening. He breaks down, actual tears and snot running down his face, fists clenched and pounding against his temples, and a keening noise like a wounded animal escapes him. 

Katy’s in his arms in an instant, holding and rocking him there in the hallway. He clutches at her like she’s the only thing keeping him upright, and that’s actually probably true. Wayne buries his face in her neck and cries like he didn’t even do for their parents.

She opens the door to lead him into the room that was _theirs_ before it was ever just _his,_ before he ever shared it with anyone else, but he baulks at the threshold and for a moment, Katy is blinded by rage. How _dare_ some two-bit slut like Angie take this from her? From Wayne? _Their_ childhood bedroom. That bitch is dead already, she just doesn’t know it yet. 

So Katy turns them around and heads back to her room, her completely Angie-free space, and shuts the door behind them. She handles him like porcelain, like bone china, as she sits him down and takes his boots and socks off, then his shirt and jeans, and tucks him into bed. Keeping one hand on him as she moves around, she texts Reilly and Jonesy, cancelling their date, and shucks her own street clothes in favour of her comfy pyjamas. 

When she joins him, he rolls into her and lets go. All the grief and pain and rage from the last year and a half comes pouring out as he wails into her chest, sobbing hysterically, heaving and shuddering like a child. It’s all she can do to hold onto him, to ride out this torrent of howling agony. Katy has always been wrathful, but this white-hot fury makes all previous grudges seem petty. Angie will be _persona non grata_ in Letterkenny after Katy’s through with her. She won’t be able to buy so much as a stamp in this goddamn town. 

It’s always seemed bass ackwards to Katy that people say _stupit shite_ like, _it’s okay,_ and _it’ll be alright,_ to grieving folks. It is emphatically neither _okay_ nor _alright,_ and it might not ever be either of those two things ever again. So she refrains from saying it herself, instead repeating over and over that she loves him, she’s got him, she’s here, he’s not alone. He cries so hard he chokes, gagging and coughing and sputtering. 

Katy’s heart breaks, seeing Wayne like this. He’s so strong and stoic, it’s easy even for her to forget all the ways he’s vulnerable. She’s viscerally glad that Dan and Darry are out, that they’re not here to witness his weakness and loss of control. It would kill him if anyone else was even in hearing distance. So she pets as much of him as she can reach and whispers soothing nonsense until he peters out, hiccoughing and sniffling. 

She grabs the box of tissue next to the bed and wipes his face and makes him blow his nose. It takes many, many tissues. Her shirt is _gross,_ soaked and clammy with tears and snot and drool, so she thinks _fuckit,_ and shucks it off and tosses it in the general direction of the hamper. 

Wayne’s breathing is still ragged and congested, and he’s hot like a fever when she presses her lips to his forehead. She asks in a whisper if he’ll be okay while she gets him some water and aspirin, but gets no response. One look at his face tells her all she needs to know: Wayne has completely checked out. The lights are on but no one’s home. He’s deep somewhere in his own mind and the only thing to do now is wait and try to call him back from where he’s gone. 

There will never be a better time than now, so Katy kisses him again and tells him she’ll be right back as she slips out of bed to get a cup of water and the bottle of headache tablets from the bathroom. She almost dives right back in when she hears him honest-to-God whimper, but it’ll only be harder on them both later, so she perseveres and moves like greased lightning. 

He won’t take the pills, but he opens his mouth when she presses them to his lips, swallows when she tips the cup for him. Nothing she does gets any kind of reaction out of him, not a twitch nor a flicker; he just lays there, not resisting but not helping either, blinking at whatever his face is turned to until she draws her fingertips over his eyelids, and he keeps them closed. 

Katy can’t fucking sleep, and she’s not a hundy-p about whatever the fuck Wayne is doing, if it could be called sleep or what. She lays awake next to him all night, head on his chest, counting the pauses between breaths and heartbeats, fighting the rising terror everytime it stretches out too long from one to the next. If anyone could die of a broken heart, it’s Wayne. 

In the morning, he’s the same. He won’t look at her or talk to her, but now with the added fun bonus of turning his face away from food and water. She can’t get him to take even the barest sip or crumb, so she just daubs drops of water on his mouth and hopes it’s enough. She doesn’t want to leave him alone for even the length of time it takes to use the bathroom, so she calls Darry into her room before chores and gives him the rundown of yesterday’s events. 

She’s seen Daryl fighting mad before, seen the fallout of his wrath when someone hurts Wayne or herself, but nothing prepared her for the fury on his face and the change of his cornflower blue eyes to almost black. If he could set fire to Angie with his mind, he would, no regrets. But she needs him _here,_ so they work out a schedule between them and call Dan to put him in charge of operations for the time being. Another extended absence from Wayne might tip them back into the red for this year, but they gotta do what they gotta do. 

Things carry on in that vein for almost a week, give or take a day. Some days Wayne will eat or drink a little something, some days not, but he won’t speak or look at them or act on his own at all. Hell, they’re lucky he’ll let them get him out of bed to piss, not that he’s putting out much, given how little he’s been taking in. Katy lets herself cry only when Darry’s watching him, when she’s out of sight and earshot. The day she decides to scrub him down with a washcloth and change the sheets ‘cos he’s getting a little ripe is the hardest. She lingers over every scar where she’s stitched and bandaged him up, every mark she’s ever doctored on him because of his stubborn refusal to let anyone but herself or Aunt Nancy take care of him since Mumma died. It’s killing her that she can’t patch this up for him, there’s no medicine to take or bone to set. 

A few stray tears escape, and she’s so _angry,_ with _fuckin’ Angie,_ with _herself_ for being so _weak,_ with _Wayne_ for running away from her. That’s all it takes for the dam to break, and she sets the bowl of water in her lap down on the floor before she can spill it everywhere, and slumps down over Wayne, shoulders shaking and face hot and red from the effort of keeping silent. 

The first thing Wayne is really aware of is warmth on his belly. He’s certain some time has passed, but he couldn’t say for sure how much. That fact seems unimportant, a long way off. What’s more immediately concerning is the shaking, and the quiet hiccoughing noises. And the _wetness,_ what the _fuck._ Why is he wet? 

He blinks and looks down at himself to see Katy face down and crying on him. _Oh, bother._ Wayne reaches down and barely brushes his fingers over her hair. She shouldn’t cry, not ever. Whatever happened, it’s his job to fix it. 

Katy doesn’t even register the touch on her head until it happens again, firmer this time, with some weight behind it, caressing over her scalp and down behind her ear over her birthmarks. She picks up her head to see Wayne, finally looking _at_ her and not _through_ her. A broken little _oh_ escapes her throat before she climbs on top of him and cries into his neck, places swapped from a week ago. 

Wayne runs his hands up and down her back, kisses her forehead and her cheek, making little _shush_ ing noises. Katy thumps his shoulder without much heat and calls him an _absolute fucker,_ complaining that he left her and he was never supposed to do that. He’s not a hundred percent on what she’s talking about, but he apologises anyway, mouthing the word _sorry_ over and over again against her ear while holding her tight. His voice seems to be MIA, but that’s nothing they haven’t dealt with before. 

She pulls herself together in short order, apart from the occasional sniffle. Affecting a briskness she doesn’t feel, she wipes her face and tells him it’s time he got off his butt and took care of himself. That means a shower and something hot in his tummy. So pitter fucking patter. 

Wayne stands under the water for longer than he really ought to, trying to let it warm him up inside-out. Without ever making a decision, his hands take over and he does what Katy told him to do, which usually works out for the best. The pressure of the spray on his skin makes him feel like he’s made of static, like snow on the tv when the channel cuts out. Using the washcloth is even worse, covering him with huge dead spots where he can’t feel anything at all. 

Stripping the bed gives Katy a moment to shed a few more tears, this time happy ones. Wayne can help her do the wash and make the bed again when he’s out of the bathroom. She shoves every bit of laundry into the basket for him to carry downstairs, going through pockets and unrolling socks. She picks up a pair of his jeans and sticks her hand in to find the black velvet box still there. _Jaysus hoppin’ Christ,_ as Ma would say. It’s like a punch in the gut, a stark reminder of everything that’s happened in the last year and a bit. Katy sets the slim rectangle very gently next to the wooden jewellry box with the agate lid on her dresser. If it were up to her, she’d take it back, throw it in the fire or something, anything to get it out of her house. But it’s Wayne’s to do with as he pleases, when he pleases. She’ll let him know it’s there, but she’s not going to force this particular issue just yet. 

In Wayne’s bedroom [*], Katy throws all of Angie’s shit into a spare pillow case and hucks it over the stair rail down to the kitchen floor. Whatever happens, happens. The two-timing whore should have thought of that before stepping out on Wayne. Then she gets an outfit together, real clothes, not more moping duds. A shirt with buttons and trousers that do not have a drawstring. She carries them along with the necessary small clothes and boots back into her room and sets them out for him before getting changed herself. She texts Darry to let him know that Wayne’s _finally_ come back to them.

By the time Wayne’s scrubbed all the stinkiest bits twice, he’s ready to crawl back in bed for another lie-down. He concentrates instead on the image of Katy crying on him and shuts off the water. A vigourous towel dry does his itchy epidermis no favours, even as he reminds himself this bullshit is all in his head. A quick wipe of the foggy mirror reveals the extent of his Depression Beard. He’s gone full Lumberjack. 100% mountain man. The dude on the paper towels better oughta look out, that smug motherfucker. Wayne’s coming for his spot. He must have been out of it for pert near a week, judging by the growth on his face. There’s no Power in Heaven or Earth that could make him put a razor near his throat right now, so it stays for the foreseeable future. Thank fuckin’ Christ it comes in even and thick, if even more wiry and violently ginger than the hair on his head. At least it’s not _curly._ There’s only so much a man can abide. He wraps the towel around his hips and goes straight to Katy’s room, not even glancing at the other pocket door behind him, either directly or in reflection. 

Katy’s waiting for him with clean clothes and boots. She’s going to take her time washing her face and he’s going to get dressed. She gives him a five minute warning as she slides the door shut behind her.

Following directions even like this is easier than thinking for himself. Katy in the driver’s seat, making decisions and bossin’ him around is not too different from normal. He leans into the comfort of routine and pulls on his clothes like a primitive piece of animatronics. He doesn’t trust himself not to fall over on one leg, so he sits down on the bed to get into shorts, socks and jeans. It takes him three tries to do up his shirt, and maybe he should go grab one of the ones that snaps instead ‘cos sure as shit, his motor control’s gone all to fuck. 

Katy comes out of the bathroom and _tsks_ over the dog’s breakfast he’s made of his plaid. She pulls him off the bed, undoes the unevenly applied buttons, then re-does them collar to waist, tucks his tails into his jeans, and buttons those for him too. She’d done this on their first day of Kindergarten, ‘cos he was all back to front due to being excited to go to school. With a little smile, she pushes him back down on the bed and does his shoes for him, ‘cos if he can’t manage buttons he’s sure not gonna lace and tie boots. When she stands up, hands on her waist, he pulls her onto his lap and hugs her tight. Even when he can’t speak, he insists on still using _please_ and _thank you_ however he can get the message across. 

Wayne lifts her hair away off her neck, brushing his thumb over the pattern of freckles behind her ear. It’s their constellation, Gemini. The Twins. Katy was born bald as a cue ball, and her birthmarks stood out all the more boldly for it [*]. Wayne was hardly any better himself, a c-hair shy of 11 months old, equally bald and pale as milk but for a light brown splotch that might, if you crossed your eyes and squinted, _might_ be mistaken for their mother’s homeland on his inner thigh. Dad told the three kids about all the constellations, how to find their way around using them, the names men gave them, the stories told about heroes and villains in the sky, all of them laid out on the porch or in the grass. They’d made a game of finding constellations in their freckles, him and Katy and Darry. They’d trace out any likely looking cluster, using marker or pen or mud, whatever was handy, making their mothers despair of the state of them and their clothes and making their Dad smile. 

Dad got in on the action a time or three. He was the one to notice Katy’s Gemini, and the almost- Cassiopeia on Darry’s collarbone. One day when Wayne skinned out of his shirt for doing hay, Dad caught his arm and turned it a bit, tracing down the back of it from shoulder to elbow, with a little, _huh, the Plough._ Wayne really was his Ma’s son [*]. By that time Wayne had accumulated so many freckles that the older ones were faded out and _mooshed_ together, creating the illusion of colour over skin that was still so naturally pale that it was translucent in some places. Anyone could find any pattern they liked in the miasma. _True,_ Dad replied. That didn’t make it any less special. The same could be said for the actual stars in the sky. 

At that first day of Kindergarten, all the other kids asked Wayne and Katy if they were twins, since they were in the same grade. They were Irish Twins, Katy explained, which is different, but still close. He probably would have just answered _Yes,_ if he could have gotten his mouth unstuck. Of course they were. They celebrated their birthdays on the same day and Katy had her birthmarks. _Duh._

Wayne looks at or touches those little spots almost everyday of their life. They’re more familiar to him than his own face. They mean _Home._ He smooches them now, like he’s done thousands of times before, but his bristles make Katy giggle. That was a tally mark in the _pro_ column for keeping the face fungus. Just to be a shit, he scrubs his chin back and forth across her skin, eliciting a squeak like he’s never heard from her before. This keeps getting better and better. 

She wiggles around out of his grip and, smiling, pulls him by the hand to the kitchen where she warms up a mug of broth for him. After so many days without hardly anything, she doesn’t want to upset his stomach. If he can keep that down for a couple of hours, she’ll give him some applesauce. Channeling obedience, Wayne sips slowly at the mug until it’s all gone. 

Darry comes in while he’s still at table, sits next to him and greets him with a soft _hey, buddy,_ and a hand on his shoulder. Wayne puts a hand on Dar’s head in return and pets his hair. Darry takes that for permission to explore Wayne’s Depression Beard, which he’s never worn before. Wayne’s been clean shaven since he needed to start shaving. He’ll sometimes let it go a day or two at most, like when they go camping, but he’s never rocked a full face-badger before. It’s a good look, Darry decides, and tells Wayne so. He’ll definitely impress the local population with his new topiary. 

The whole interaction is the most ridiculous fuckin’ thing Katy’s ever goddamn seen, and she’s pert near apoplectic from stifling her conniptions. These two dummies of hers are petting each other like ginger chimps in a wildlife sanctuary. She’s gonna _wee._

But they’re staring at each other, super soft eyes and just so… serene and peaceful, she doesn’t want to interrupt or draw attention to it in case they feel like they have to stop. Wayne looks almost happy, so relaxed with his smooth brow and gently curving lips, completely opposite to his usual pinched and puckered squint and scowl, which was more than she’d dared to hope for so soon. 

As quietly and unobtrusively as she can, she sets Darry’s lunch on the table and starts stealth recording them, Dar murmuring in a low voice, telling Wayne about the things he’d missed the last several days. They’re still stroking each other’s face and hair, just to keep contact. She gets a solid ninety seconds of _100% pure Columbian blackmail gold_ before she feels compelled to remind them to eat. 

Darry smiles at Wayne and nods for Katy’s benefit, and then leans in and plants one on Wayne as he curls their pinky fingers together. It’s just a quick buss, but Wayne presses into it just a fraction. Katy’s surprised enough that she almost forgets about the recording that’s still going. Forget blackmail. No one’s ever seeing this but her. It’s suddenly too private, too precious for words. She’d kill anyone who saw so much as a single frame of the video. She’s keeping it forever. 

Darry sits back and eats one-handed, holding onto Wayne’s littlest finger throughout the meal, while Wayne finishes his mug of chicken broth. 

The rest of the day, Wayne dumbly follows her around the house, spacing out occasionally, coming back to himself when she shakes his shoulder or calls his name. If she hands him something he’ll hold it, if she gives him one or two word directions he follows them until his mind wanders again. She gently redirects him every time, tries to keep him engaged as much as she can, praises him while he works. 

The chicken broth stays down, and the applesauce too, so she pushes the envelope a little and gives him banana, toast and more broth for dinner. He eats and drinks slowly, and everything settles fine. The more he eats, the more his appetite returns, the better he feels in himself. 

Darry teases him lightly by poking his food whenever he seems like he’s losing focus. Wayne retaliates by poking Darry himself, in the ribs or the ear or the hand, whatever he can reach at the moment, and by grabbing the offending finger and shoving it back towards its owner. 

Both boys help clean up the kitchen, clearing the table and drying the dishes together after dinner. More accurately, Darry helps Katy by helping Wayne to do his regular chores, in addition to doing his own. It gets harder and harder to keep him from drifting as the evening goes on, so they call it a night and go to sleep early. 

Wayne actually refuses to be more than an arm’s length away from Katy and/or Darry, so they swap off getting changed and all crowd into the bathroom to brush teeth before squishing Wayne between them in Katy’s bed. 

Every day Wayne gets better, keeping it together and maintaining focus longer, doing tasks by himself without being prompted until he’s doing all his regular work like normal. The trade off for this is he loses the open expression he’d been wearing and resumes his habitual sour lemon face; forehead wrinkled, chin pushed forward, mouth all hard. He still hasn’t said a word, or slept in his own bed since he came home _that day._ The necklace has remained on the dresser next to the wood and agate jewellry box. Wayne refuses to look at it, skips over it or blanks it out when he’s in the room. 

Katy packs up all of Wayne’s things and moves them into her room, rather than continuing to go back and forth fetching things for him every morning, all because he refuses to set foot in there. Then she tears down the curtains, strips the bed, and throws them all in a huge, heavy-duty yard waste bag along with all the pillows. The quilts she puts in their parents’ room, and swaps them for the ones left on their bed. She breaks Wayne’s bed frame down into pieces and opens the window to chuck them out, the bedside tables, the lamp, every drawer in the armoire, every other piece of the armoire, and the bin bag following right behind. Sliding the mattress down the stairs is a bit tricky on her own, but she manages it without knocking anything off the wall or dropping it. She loads everything into the back of the truck and heads to the municipal tip. 

Lunchtime rolls around and Katy rolls up the laneway, truck full of all new[*] furniture and several bags from the hardware store. She shoves a handful of paint chips under Wayne’s nose at the kitchen table with instructions to _pick two._ He sorts through them and hands back a strip with a light, almost periwinkle blue and a deep violet midnight circled on it. He tips his head to the side, silently asking _Good enough?_ She nods. _Good stuff._

The room is sanded, hoovered, dusted and taped in a couple of hours. The overhead light fixture comes down, plug and switch plates come off, even the cupboard doors come off. That’s enough for one day, so she washes up and starts on dinner.

The next day it’s back to the hardware store to get the paint, and she splashes out on a decorative set of switch plates and plug covers. After all, they’re not expensive and it’s a nice, simple touch. On the way to the checkout line, she walks past the lighting department and she doesn’t even mean to look, _honestly,_ but there’s a really nice overhead light and fan combo, and it’s on sale, and the whole point of this fuckin’ exercise is to remove any and everything that could possibly remind Wayne of _fuckin’ Angie, may she step on legos barefoot for the rest of her short, miserable life,_ so in the shopping trolley it goes and okay, that’s the _last thing,_ she swears. 

She does the edges first, then rolls the walls. Gone is the orange sherbert and cream of their childhood, replaced with the soothing colour of a late summer evening. She looks around, nods to herself, and leaves a plate of sliced onions in the middle of the floor. Those get burned in the firepit the next morning. After that, only the trim remains and she knocks that out in a couple of hours before lunch. 

Katy raids her fabric cache for something suitable and finds a perfect surprise, a blue and white plaid with a pinstripe of orange in the pattern. Any dummy can knock out a pair of curtains in an afternoon, even Wayne and Daryl can do it, but she also makes four pillow shams and a duvet for the brand new comforter she bought and a set of sheets in a pale blue that goes with the walls. 

Reilly and Jonesy carry up the new mattress and Wayne’s new-but-one bedframe and help her put it all together, and then bring in the rest of the furniture. She installs the new lights herself, ‘cos no way is she trusting those two idiots anywhere near the house’s wiring, even if she shut the power off at the mains. At the end of day four, the room looks totally different. It suits Wayne, even if she says so herself. 

She chases off the hockey players with the promise of a date soon, and arranges everything until it’s just _exactly_ how Wayne likes it. In her room they follow her rules, in Wayne’s room, they follow his, and same again for Darry. It’s only fair. 

After dinner Katy puts a toque on Wayne’s head and slides it down to cover his eyes and nose so he can’t see _shit_ as she leads him by the hand upstairs to the room. He knows she’s been working in there, but he hasn’t seen anything except the paint chips, not one thread of fabric nor a stick of furniture. It’s gonna be a complete surprise. 

He doesn’t actually need her to lead him around, Wayne could navigate their house blind and stunned, and in fact has done exactly that. He hesitates again at the door, but takes a deep breath and steps in. Somehow, the world has not ended. Maybe he can actually do this.

Katy positions him right where she wants him, facing exactly the right direction, and warns him she’s going to pull the toque off in 3… 2… 1… 

Wayne blinks as his eyes focus. The first thing is that the room’s orientation has been rotated ninety degrees. That’s new. Everything’s arranged exactly how it had been, just turned clockways. Instead of the bed facing the door to the bathroom, it now faces the door to the hall, and everything else has pivoted around it. Then he takes in the colours, the bedspread, the furniture. She’s replaced every single item in the room. Part of him expected to immediately hate it, to reject on pure instinct the radical change wrought on the room, but this is… comfortable. It’s Different enough that it’s like having a whole new room that he’s never had before, but Similar enough that that it feels sort of familiar, like a half-forgotten memory. 

He sits on the bed and has a split-second of complete disorientation, like the room is spinning around him, but that’s silly and it stops as soon as he blinks again. Katy tells him she picked the fabric because it looks like her favourite shirt of his, and the orange pinstripe is like a memento, a small reminder of when they shared the room as kids. He picks out one of the lines she’s talking about and runs a finger down a length of it. Yeah, it is like that. It’s perfect. New and old at the same time. 

Wayne looks around again, inspecting the furniture Katy picked for him. There’s a horizontal dresser in some type of dark wood, the bed is black metal tubing, the nightstands are two different colours and styles. There’s a single upright chair in the corner with a floor lamp next to it. Nothing matches, it’s a hodge-podge of secondhand items that’ve probably been circulating around the town and environs since it was established. He loves it. It feels real homey, not even a little staged or fake, like someone had been living here already for twenty years, no breaking-in period required. 

Raising his hands and holding them out to her, Wayne beckons for Katy to join him, and pulls her onto the bed when she comes over. He lays her head on the pillow, holding himself up on one elbow so he can kiss her forehead, cupping her neck in his other hand. It’s not nearly enough to convey how grateful he is, moved to the depths of his soul, how deeply loved he feels that she would do this for him. She deserves to feel as cherished as he does in this moment. He moves slowly, sliding his hand down her back to rest at her waist and stroke his thumb across her ribs as he reverently kisses the tip of her nose, the apples of her cheeks, her smile, their constellation behind her ear, the dip in the clavicle at the base of her throat, and finally right over her heart. 

He settles down, wrapping his arms around her and laying his cheek right over the last place he’d kissed. Katy curls an arm around his head to play with his hair while her other hand pets his beard. She’s grown fond of it since he woke up, says it makes him look older. Distinguished. Katy presses a smooch of her own on the crown of his head and tangles their legs together. Wayne is warm and happy, drifting towards sleepiness with the drumbeat of Katy’s pulse under his ear. For the first time since the crash, nothing hurts. Nothing hurts. 

They lay like that, on their sides and curling into one another, until it’s time to go to bed properly. Katy refuses to sleep in street clothes, so they get up and change and brush teeth and all that jazz. At the sink, there’s a Moment when Katy waits for Wayne, waits to see which way he’ll turn. Their bathroom is right between their bedrooms, so he could go either way. 

Wayne’s not ready to be on his own yet, but he feels like he should sleep in the room Katy spent so much time working on. So he takes her hand in his, kisses her palm, and laces their fingers together. He’s an open book to her, it’s not rocket science. 

Katy rewards him with a smile and a hug, so he bends down and scoops her up in his arms and carries her back to the bed. Wayne likes to sleep on the side closest to the wall, so he kicks the blankets down and gently settles her in before crawling over her and pulling the covers back up. It takes a few minutes to reshuffle everything back together between them, but the feeling of a new bed, new mattress, new sheets made just for him, and the hands that love him enough to make it all happen sends contentment and happiness running through his veins, thick and sticky like syrup, making him feel heavy and lethargic. He can’t hold her close enough or tight enough, and anyway they’re soon to be asleep, so he kisses her once more for goodnight and lays his head next to hers on the pillow, foreheads and noses touching and breath mingling as he slides down into darkness. 

Other than getting the stuff together for their new room, Katy hasn’t been to town since the day Wayne came home after finding Angie cheating on him. She’s been sending Reilly and Jonesy to do any errands that can’t be put off so she can stay home and help Wayne. So she hasn’t really been paying attention to what people are saying. 

When the boys bring her the scuttlebutt, shuffling their feet and mumbling to their shoes, she’s sure she must have misheard. Angie’s been in the bar, every night, working her regular shifts and then some, seen with some guy who is _definitely not Wayne._ Folk have been wondering where he’s at, why he’s allowing this to happen. If he’s gonna fight again, or what?

Katy _seethes._ That bitch thinks she can start wearing less and going out more, as though she’s not completely and totally in the wrong all by herself? As though she hadn’t trampled the heart of the best man the town’s ever known, saving the presence of Wayne’n’Darry’n’Katy’s own dear, sainted Dad? 

She retracts the grocery list she’d prepared. Katy’s going into town. 

What Reilly and Jonesy had brought her was a mere appetiser. Katy now gathers up all the dish, the full ten-course soup-to-nuts. Angie has been seen with _multiple_ guys. Livin’ it up. Drinkin’ it down. Shakin’ ass and takin’ numbers. Even Gail’s been giving her the side-eye. 

This last she gets from the barkeep herself. Gail’s always had a soft spot for them, and _especially_ for Wayne. All her advances might make him uncomfortable, but he’s not above accepting the occasional free drink. Katy works that to her advantage now. Telling Gail’s effectively telling the whole town. It’s kind of the nuclear option, but Angie started that countdown clock when she didn’t even have the decency to wait a couple of weeks before acting like the two-dollar tart she is. Everybody knows now anyway, or at least, they know Wayne and Angie aren’t together anymore. Time to blow up that bitch’s spot. A couple of strategic _you didn’t hear it from me_ ’s go a long way to making sure Angie’s reputation is trashed. _Bad gas travels fast in a small town,_ as Wayne is fond of saying. Good. Let the fucker _burn._

A couple of days later, Darry’s out on the back porch smoking a dart and waiting for Wayne to finish his coffee before they see to the latter half of the morning’s chores. He looks up from his phone when he hears a car pull up the laneway. Angie. Oh, _hell, no._ She does not get to swank in here like she can come and go as she pleases. Not after what she did. He pockets the phone and kicks the door frame twice as he steps off the porch. 

Wayne and Katy both look out the window when they hear the bang and rattle. The sight of Angie’s car makes Wayne’s face go all blank and empty, which fills Katy with incandescent rage. He pushes back from the table to go upstairs, and Katy stops him for a comforting kiss _en passant._ He dithers at the landing, and then decides to give his balls a tug and goes into _their_ room, his and Katy’s. Never again anyone else’s. He lays on the bed and almost pulls the pillow over his head to cover his ears when he hears Darry’s voice, clear as a bell through the open window, tellin’ Angie to kick rocks. 

Darry stands there, arms crossed, fully glaring at Angie. She can get back in her little car and turn right around ‘cos there’s nothing and no one for her here. 

She just came here to talk, so let her in. 

Katy bangs the door open and stands there, attitude identical to Darry’s. 

Darry don’t think so, not now and not ever. Angie’s not welcome here, and she needs to go. 

Angie tells him to _go home, Daryl._

Katy scoffs and Darry barks out a bitter little laugh at that. Ain’t it funny? This _is_ his home, since he was five years old, more than it was _ever_ hers, for all the effort she went to to get him put out of it. 

That sets Angie on the back foot, but she rallies and starts saying he has _no right-_

But Darry has every right in the world. He _owns_ thirty-three percent of the farm, the share _his parents_ left each of ‘em. So she can get off _his_ property. He feels a vicious pride in reminding her that this is _his_ family, _his_ place, not hers. He was here first, and now she’s gone and he’s _still_ here, and always will be, despite all her best efforts. 

Angie makes another bid. What about her stuff, she has a right to get that. 

Katy tells Angie she can pick it up at the bar, later, after Katy drops it off. 

Angie says she _knows_ Katy was the one to put the bad word out on her name. Half the town won’t even give her the time of day now. Her parents’ car got egged last night.

Katy replies that’s the _least_ of what she can expect by way of revenge, so she better watch her back, _Angela Wenick._ It’s the full name that really digs in. 

In a fit of desperation, Angie tries hollering out Wayne’s name, saying she still loves him, she just wants to talk, but Darry grabs her by the arm and hustles her back to her little shitbox sedan, while Katy yells back, _well he ain’t wanna see you, so fucking fuck off._

Angie jerks her arm out of Darry’s hold, but he wasn’t really trying all that hard anyway. If he had been, she’d be sporting a black-and-blue armband the precise width and shape of Darry’s hand. She says that she’ll talk to Wayne sooner or later, they can’t stop her. 

Darry shrugs and bares his teeth in a sharp, nasty little grin, more like a coyote than his usual sweet smile. Well, that’s as may be. But _if_ it ever happens, it sure as fuck ain’t gonna happen here. He pulls the driver’s side door open and gestures her inside. 

Katy pipes up from the porch again, _you heard what my brother said._ Now get out of here before she gets bored of behavin’. 

Darry tells Angie when Katy gives a warnin’, she don’t repeat it. He’s not the type of prick to ever raise a hand to a woman, no matter how much he might want to, but that don’t mean he won’t stand back and cheer while his sister beats some wholesale ass on the trollop that ran around on their brother. His eyes go dark and his grin gets even more unsettlingly sharp. 

Angie’s face blanches at that. Against their united front, there’s nothing she can do but retreat. 

Darry glares after her car reversing back down the laneway and tearing off before turning around and walking over toward Katy. He stops right in front of her on the steps to the porch, cranes his neck up to look at her. 

_Go home, Daryl,_ indeed. Neither of them can believe that shit. They get a couple of good chuckles out of it. It has the flavour of something that will be an inside joke, albeit, not a funny one. The nerve of the wench. 

Katy pulls Darry into a hug, lays her arms around his shoulders and tucks his head under her chin. They did a good job just now. 

Darry nods and holds her waist tight. He’s still shaking slightly from the force of his anger. If Angie’d been a man, there’d be nothing left but a damp, greasy patch on the laneway. The effort of reigning in all that fury has him keyed up, raring to go. This time last year, he’d already have hoovered a couple of rails to take the edge off. Now he just wants to _fight something_ , to tear it apart with his bare hands, and he wonders if this is how Wayne feels all the time, poor bastard. Definitely going to a meeting tonight. 

He feels Katy’s fingers threading through his hair, tipping his head back to look up at her again, so she can plant a kiss on him. Darry relaxes the moment her lips touch his, soft and sweet. His head clears and once again, all is right with the world. They better oughta go check on Wayne though. 

They go inside, Darry’s arm over Katy’s shoulders and hers around his waist to find Wayne at the kitchen table, already pouring shots. He sets the bottle of Gus’n’Bru down and holds out three little glasses in one hand. Without separating, Katy and Darry each take one, slam the shot, two taps on the table for good luck. Wayne wraps both of them in his big, big arms and says his first words in _weeks: Thank you._

Darry might be tougher than a set of winter tyres, but _fuck,_ he can’t help it, he starts leaking around the eyes. Oh, buddy. He puts his unoccupied hand on the back of Wayne’s head and presses their foreheads together. He’d do anything for Wayne. Anything. 

Wayne surprises them all when he rasps out _love you both s’fuckin’much,_ voice hoarse from disuse. He’s said it maybe two or three times to them in their whole life. Not that they don’t _know,_ he’s been good about showing them as much as he can, but still, _hearing it_ out loud turns Darry’s insides to jelly and he just has to show Wayne what it means to him. He tilts his head to the side a little and slides his tear-damp face to line up with Wayne’s and kisses him full on the mouth. 

It’s nothin’ exciting, just a close-mouthed press of lip to lip, but it contains multitudes. Everything Darry feels for Wayne, which is _a lot._ Every fight, every triumph, every time they shared a bed or a toy or a secret, every happiness, every sadness, the totality of their life is in that kiss. 

Wayne takes a little breath and presses into it for a long second before Darry pulls back and then Katy’s crowding in for her own. They kiss for joy, for love, for grief and sorrow and comfort. For family. Forever and ever, world without end, Amen. 

Of course, nothing _ends_ there. The trusting beasts look to them, and they have a duty. They wash their faces at the sink and fuckin’ get on with things. Darry does take it easy on him though, and lets him re-sort the bales in the hay barn. It’s soothing for Wayne. _That’s_ a hay bale, and _that’s_ a straw bale, and that’s _bar-leh._ Thing’s’re just easier if they’re all grouped together so’s no one has to think about which one to grab, they’re all just _there,_ ready to go. 

Chorin’ does take it out of the lot of them, and after dinner, Darry doesn’t really want to get up and go to a meeting, but he should, so he does. Wayne calls out a _hey_ as Darry passes the couch for the door, but Katy shushes him, tells him to let Darry do what he needs to. Darry tells them he’ll be back soon, and still feelin’ the love from the morning, gives them each a kiss as he pockets his wallet and keys on his way out. 

Meetings are meetings; shitty burnt coffee from an urn that’s never been cleaned, stale pastries and the smell of days-old dart smoke, fluorescent church basement lighting with the one flickering bulb that’s always on the edge of burning out. _Spring has sprung, the grass is riz, it’s loitering time for greasy skids._ They’ve seen the annual fall-off in attendance that accompanies the warm weather; makes it not so hard to be out all hours chasing the next score. In a month or two it’ll pick up again, as some folks who thought they had their shit under control realise they very much don’t. Darry makes some mental notes about who [*] he’s seen lately, who he should have a kindly word with if he should happen to see them in town. 

He stays to help stack chairs and tidy up after. That’s when Glenn corners him. Normally Glenn’s really only there to open and lock up after them. He’s good about staying out of the meetings themselves if he’s not leading one, which he only does if he’s pinch-hitting. But now he’s got this new project he’s working on, a mixer for the youth group singles. It will be upstairs in one of the conference rooms, and some of the kids have formed a band, called _The Salty Treats._

Honestly, it sounds like just about the worst fuckin’ time he can imagine, but maybe he ought to check it out. Wayne’s going to wanna get back on the horse some time. If Darry can get the lay of the land, there might be a nice girl or two who he could put the good word in with for Wayne. 

He comes home and the twins are already in bed, so he goes to his room and gets ready to go to sleep himself. Dawn comes awful early. Darry’s only just clicked out the light when Katy comes in and asks what the fuck he’s doing, why hasn’t he joined them?

Darry didn’t want to disturb them, is all. 

Well, consider their shit well and truly disturbed. Dummy. Now will he fuckin’ _come to bed?_

Darry don’t need telling twice. He follows Katy down the hall and makes Wayne move into the centre. It’s ridiculous, trying to fit three grown adults into a bed this size, but they’ve done it all their life, so why stop now? It’s just as hot and sticky and cramped with feet and shoulders and Inconveniently Pointy Bits accidentally jabbing into ribs and bellies as it always is, but none of them would trade it for the world. Eventually knees and elbows get sorted out between them and everyone settles down for a good snooze. 

The youth group isn’t as bad as Darry feared. The band is actually pretty good, even if they do play the cheesiest songs. It’s still fun to sing and clap along, and there are girls there he definitely would never have met if he hadn’t come. That girl Margaret, too, woo-hoo. The thing she did to his finger, boy _howdy_. Goes to show that it’s been way too long since Darry’s had some proper Companionship. They go out for milkshakes after and he keeps her talking to find out about some of the other girls in the group, to see if any would be a good match for Wayne. 

Darry’s not really thinking any of this would be long-term for either of them. More like, training wheels. Practise dating without the pressure to _perform._ They could go out for a couple of dates with some nice girls who don’t expect much more than a dinner, a couple of beers and a game or two of bowling. It sounds pretty ideal for both of them. If one or the other should happen to strike gold, well then, all the better. If not, then no one’s feelings are getting hurt. 

Darry comes home to Katy yellin’ the house down. He shuts the door behind himself as gently as he can and then follows the sound of the world ending. 

Katy is distraught. That much is clear. The question is, _Why?_ Darry looks to Wayne for answers.

Wayne, who is now clean-shaven, explains that Katy is upset because he didn’t ask her first before shaving his Depression Beard. He wasn’t aware that Katy had _editing privileges_ on his _face._

Katy throws her hands up. It was a _shock_ , is all. Everyone agreed how well he looked in it, she thought he’d keep it for a while. She’d looked forward to seeing people witness the magnificence of the ginger raccoon for the first time. 

Mouth furiously puckering, Wayne levels a finger at Katy. _That,_ that right there, _THAT_ is _exactly_ why he shaved it off. Besides, it wouldn’t _do_ to let on that Wayne’s facial hair growth had anything to do with a lapse in self-care. He won’t let the bastards grind him down. [*]

Darry doesn’t know how or why he keeps getting dragged into these things. All _fraternité_ aside, it’s like trying to mediate between a couple bitterly divorcing after thirty years. It’s never only the disagreement of the moment, it’s every single fight they’ve ever had in their entire life coming out of the woodwork. The only way to get out of this unscathed is to refuse to play, consistently, every time. So far, Darry’s lifetime batting average is .195. _Pedestrian._

Every step up to the plate is a new game though, and he enforces his non-interference policy as tactfully as he knows how, i.e., by telling them he’s not getting involved in their marital disputes. 

This achieves the desired effect, however it does backfire slightly. Wayne and Katy stop fighting with each other, but only to turn on him instead. Rather than further engage in the yelling portion of tonight’s programme, Darry declares victory, throws his hands up like Winston Churchill, and backs down the hall into his own, private room, with his own bed, all to himself and sibling-free, and shuts the door in their faces. 

Just as Katy raises a fist to bang on the door and demand that Darry present himself, he opens it just enough to poke his head through and tells them to quit yelling or he’s gonna go spend the night at Mumma’s, and shuts it again before either of them can argue. 

Wayne knows when he’s beaten and about-faces to walk back down the hall. Katy still hasn’t moved when he opens the door to their room, so he asks if she’s coming or what. She shakes herself out of whatever thought was preoccupying her and joins him. _Fuckin’ marital dispute,_ his left nut. If they were really fighting, she’d have gone to her other room. 

Over breakfast Darry invites him to some kinda church group for singles. The idea fills him with dread and makes him wanna spit. It’s too soon. Darry shrugs and moves on, but he keeps bringing it up, telling Wayne about the crowd there, the music, the punch. Katy thinks it’s a good idea for him to see what’s out there, but she thinks it’s better if he tries just hooking up. He’s only ever really dated one girl. It’s time to explore his options, maybe discover something new. Darry disagrees; he thinks Wayne needs to ease into it, just dip a toe in the pool before diving in. He needs to meet a nice girl who isn’t going to put any pressure on him. Katy insists that Wayne should quit being a Sally and rip the band-aid off, ‘cos dragging it out is worse. 

They get kinda heated about it, snapping back and forth at the table and trying to kick each other’s shins. Dar takes himself off in a huff to Mumma’s for a while, so Katy and he have the house to themselves. It’s too big and too quiet without Darry there to help fill it up, but Katy refuses to apologise. She did nothing wrong, Darry just needs time to himself. She shows him that Tinder thing. She makes it sound easy and convenient, but when Wayne thinks about it, it’s actually kinda horrible, like Amazon for people. Just order one up with the click of a button, Prime shipping included. Filter and sort by desired attributes. The whole business makes him itchy all over, treating _people_ as _things._

He knows they mean well, and the idea of acting like Angie doesn’t matter, didn’t hurt him, has its appeal. But it does and she did and he’s not ready to let go of that yet. Five years is a long time. He’s not the type of prick to leave himself vulnerable. It’ll take time. 

They go to Gail’s for Thirsty Thursday and Darry makes his pitch for the youth group again while Katy picks it apart. Gailer propositioning him is what finally convinces him to give it a try. It’s that or swinging blind in the batting cage of the internet. Meeting people face-to-face was hard enough for Wayne, using that app was impossible. Just opening it had him queasier than Donkey Juice. 

So the youth group turns out to be just as much of a shitshow as Wayne expected. Fucking Glenn and his inappropriate interest. Fucking Grindr. It’s a relief to retire back to the familiar ground of Modean’s, even if the hockey players and the skids beat him there. Then the chubby citiot walks in and Wayne goes for a dart before he starts tearing the bar apart with his bare hands. 

Katy’s there out back, putting away the last of a two-six and smoking a joint in his truck, like he hasn’t asked her a bazillion times not to. God bless the girl, she tries to give him a pep talk, tries to give him _permission_ to be himself, but it’s no good. He’s not himself, not anymore. 

Alexander stumbles out to hang a piss in the garbage, and wouldn’t you know it, there’s the Citiot not far behind, like he’s _lookin’_ fer trouble. Alexander might be a lot of things, but he doesn’t deserve to be treated like a sideshow exhibit, so Wayne goes over and claps the citiot across the back of the head. They get into it a little, and the conversation turns to Angie, because _of course_ it does. Then the asshole just _has_ to go and mention Katy, and Wayne fuckin’. Snaps. Like he always does when someone drags her into things. People really ought to know by now not to try and use Katy against Wayne, but _fuck,_ stupidity reigns supreme. 

Katy jumps out of the truck and runs over to him, hands him the two-six and says _You’ve come this far._

‘Welcome to _Fuckin’_ Letterkenny.’

END CREDITS.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *He’s known the both of them since they were all kids, even though they’re several years older than Darry’n’Katy and himself. Mrs. McMurray had babysat them a couple of times even, back when she was still a Ms. and not a McMurray at all.[return to text]
> 
> *Though, definitely not at the same time; he likes having both his balls attached, please and thank you.[return to text]
> 
> *On paper at least. Their parents had been the Christmas and Easter Only types, but he and Katy had been Baptised, received Communion, and Confirmed as kids. He might not be a Christian but he wasn’t a _heathen,_ thankyouverymuch. [return to text]
> 
> * _Their_ bedroom; _by God,_ she will burn every trace of Angie out of there, overwrite every iota of her existence and make it _theirs_ again. Angie does not get to taint their home like this. Katy _refuses._ [return to text]
> 
> *There’s pictures.[return to text]
> 
> *Out of pure self-preservation, Wayne’d not thought too deeply about that, but now he wishes mightily that he’d been less of a nutsack back then and asked what that _meant._ [return to text]
> 
> *Well, _new-to-them,_ but in excellent nick. No sense in spending money they don’t have to for no reason. [return to text]
> 
> *Thing about N/A in a small town was there was always more _N_ than _A_ by about a factor of three, near as Darry could figure. Half the people in here he’d gone to school with at one point or another. The other half he knew from the Ag Hall, or the Legion, or the Ukrainian Hall, or Aunt Doreen’s dance classes, or he knew their families. He’d seen them all at Jamboree, or the Planting or Harvest Festivals, or some other town event. A couple of the people in here he used to get high with on the regular. One of the gals in here was his hook-up. And that didn’t even begin to address all the folks out there _right now_ still getting high, and the more that joined them every day. So, no; plenty of shite about for a body to poison themselfs with, not so much of the Anonymity. [return to text]
> 
> *Bastards, in this instance, meaning Angie.[return to text]


End file.
